Flowers at Saatchi

I went to the Flowers exhibition in at the Saatchi Gallery yesterday. It’s on until the 5th of May so if you are around in London in the near future I think its well worth the trip.

If anything, just to go see Rebecca Louise Law‘s installation la fLEUR MORTE.

It’s difficult to put into words, and my photos don’t do it justice. There’s a presence to the piece that resists capture. It’s something you really have to stand inside to fully appreciate.

The installation is composed of over 100,000 dried flowers, collected throughout the span of Law’s career. Each flower is painstakingly strung by hand on fine brass wire — which when multiplied across the work is a gesture of astonishing patience and care – given how fragile the medium is. There’s so much labour, time, and attention embedded in the piece.

It feels almost devotional.

You walk beneath and through the piece — a vast, vaulted canopy suspended in space, a riot of faded colour hanging in the air. The flowers surround you on all sides, like a temple, a softness, suspended stillness.

As Law says, “I look at a preserved flower and I see time.” And you really do. Some of the flowers in la fLEUR MORTE were dried and preserved over two decades ago. I found myself thinking about everything that has happened in the world since some of those flowers were alive — all the stories, seasons, upheavals, joys, and griefs that have unfolded in the intervening years.

I wrote in my notes on my phone that each flower is a “sunlit moment plucked from time and suspended.” They are all, in a sense, embodied sunlight — time-travelling relics of once living matter. You can’t help but feel that its a sculpture in/of time, a meditation on impermanence, care, and beauty held just at the edge of decay. la fLEUR MORTE

It’s incredibly moving, and deeply beautiful.

The other hilight was the pressed flowers under glass light box work of Amy Shelton. I think the image below should be in HDR on my actual blog if you click though. Wonderful work. I could look at it all day.

On The Blog:

Feb 2025 | Photo 365

I got my photos for Feb up. Crazy to think I’ve now done 1100+ days in a row. Passing 1k seems like only yesterday.

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Helpful LLocal Models

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Photo 365

The Ministry Of My Own Labour

What the hell did I do this week? I honestly can’t even remember. Going on holiday next weekend tho. Can’t wait.

Terminal Access

Lance “it’s ya boi” Robotson interviewed Deepfates about memetic theory, AI and stuff on NeoMainia pod. Really great episode.

Reading

I’m still re-reading Say What You Mean: A Mindful Approach to Nonviolent Communication by Oren Jay Sofer. Still re-reading Autobiography of a Yogi by Paramahansa Yogananda veyr strange to be reading this after so much meditation vs the me that read it the first time.

I’ve decided that I’m going to read Saints: A New Legendary of Heroes, Humans and Magic by Amy Jeffs month by month. Being introduced to the saints in the months of their saints day. So the hardback is going to be a permanent feature by my bed this year.

Made some more progress on The Road Ahead by Bill Gates. Currently reading his very 90’s takes on media theory. Unfortunatly it’s still the sort of take that dominates mainstream discourse 30 years later.

Salvation – Rebecca Black

I think Blacks album is banging. I posted the single Sugar Water Cyanide when it came out, but the 7 tracks on this album don’t disappoint. Every track on this is a banger.

I’m really excited about where pop music is going right now.

Remember Kids:

The post Flowers at Saatchi appeared first on thejaymo.net.

I just got Apple Intelligence on my MacBook, and I’ve spent today playing around with the summarisation, rewriting, and proofreading features.

My hot take: It’s fine.

I’ve had all these features and more running via my launcher, Alfred, for months now, so experiencing them doesn’t feel as magical as when I got LLaMA 3.1 8B running locally on my machine back in July. The model does a decent job—it’s not bleeding-edge for me, but for many people using it for the first time, it absolutely will be.

What really strikes me is how quickly my expectations have shifted. Summarise, proofread, rewrite—these tools just sit alongside spell check and grammar suggestions. It’s 2024: of course my computer can summarise a chunk of text, make a list, or rewrite a paragraph in a different tone.

And every time I use this feature, somewhere behind the scenes a cached 12GB LLM Isekais into existence, gets handed some text, processes it, and then blinks out again. No uncanny chatbot negotiation. It just works.

And that’s today’s takeaway-how mundane it all is already. This brand-new technology is becoming invisible, baked into workflows so seamlessly we stop noticing them. This shift feels inevitable. Apple Intelligence is already the boring AI future.

Going into 2025 AI is advancing in two distinct directions. On one side, frontier models—GPT-4, Claude, and whatever comes next—will continue adding features, growing more capable, and more expensive. We’ll also see more specialist models, smaller systems, being hyper-optimised for specific tasks, rather than the general purpose models we have now. These big and expensive frontier cloud systems will evolve into clusters of intelligences, with different kinds of functions and capabilities based on what you’re doing.

OpenAI’s $200-a-month Pro subscription doesn’t actually seem that unreasonable for the kind of capabilities described above. $200 bucks a month is way cheaper than asking an intern to do something for you (like read a book) a month ago. And these ‘pro’ tools will keep getting better.

But as I wrote back in July: The Only Acceptable Price Point Is Free.

Which is the other direction things are going. Away from the flashy announcements and innovative cloud products like MidJourney’s Patchwork which wrote abut yesterday, local models are quietly making big progress.

For everyone wondering about how much value $20 a month for GPT/Claude can truly provide, someone else is running a good enough model locally. I have Apple intelligence AND a Llama 8B nano variant running on my machine right now.

Adobe is making a big deal about its generative tool Firefly, but Krita’s seamless integration with Stable Diffusion is super fast, super performant, and all running locally.

This is just the beginning. With the imminent release of Mat and Holly’s Public Diffusion model from Spawning, people mad about copyright (or data centre energy consumption) are going to have to find something else to get mad about.

Also, Meta’s new 3.3 70B model has ChatGPT 4 level intelligence means that it’s March 2023 in local model land – which wasn’t that long ago. Things are getting optimised fast. True, it’s a little too big to run on my machine (it needs 38GB of RAM), but it’s plenty small enough to be running on a souped-up Mac Mini somewhere in the corner of an office, shared by everyone, integrated into your OS, for free, forever.

Whilst a lot of focus this week has been on the release of Google’s video model Veo, Gemini Flash 2.0 was also just announced. Variants of its mini model are just months away from running on our phones, handling not just grammar and summarisation, but maybe, if and when APIs are made available at the OS level, even stranger things.

The only thing these smaller nano models require is battery power. They aren’t burning down the rainforest, using the power of a small city, and the water of a small country. They are just lil’ guys in your phone and everyone is going to end up with devices that have ‘Intelligence Inside’.

We are already in the era of intelligence is too cheap to meter. The real question is what are we going to use it for?

Little Computer People, which I’ve written about a lot, Tamagotchi-like agents, onboard inside our devices. I find the idea very compelling.

These tools may no longer feel as magical or news as the once did, but it’s still a weird and exciting time.

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

Each month, we explored the themes, characters, and plot of Pattern Recognition, Spook Country, and Zero History, sharing our thoughts on the transition from Gibson’s signature cyberpunk style to a more realist form. I think this shift in tone provided Eddie a refreshing change from what had come before, even though the genre’s underlying concerns are still present in the series.

I’ve linked to the individual Wolf Newsletter posts and embedded the podcast episodes below:

Blue Ant Trilogy

Wolf Pod #009: Patten Recognitions

Welcome to the new episode of the Wolf Podcast.

Today I’m talking with Jay Springett, writer, thinker, worldrunner, and podcaster. You can find him at his website, his Permanently Moved podcast, or on substack at Experience.Computer.

Today, we’re onto Pattern Recognition, the first novel in the Blue Ant Trilogy. We talk about the internet, Gibson’s career more broadly, and a host of other things. Here’s the interview with Gibson that Jay mentions as well.

Wolf Pod #010: Spook Country

Welcome to the new episode of the Wolf Podcast.

Today I’m talking with Jay Springett, writer, thinker, worldrunner, and podcaster. You can find him at his website, his Permanently Moved podcast, or on substack at Experience.Computer. Check out his recent appearance on the Ecogradia podcast! It’s great.

Today, we’re onto Spook Country, which reminded me more of Gibson’s previous novels. And so your mileage may vary with that, but I think it’s a bit of a reversion.

Wolf Pod #011: Zero History

Welcome to the new episode of the Wolf Podcast.

Today I’m talking with Jay Springett, writer, thinker, worldrunner, and podcaster. You can find him at his website, his Permanently Moved podcast, or on substack at Experience.Computer. Check out his recent appearance on the Ecogradia podcast! It’s great.

Today, we’re onto Zero History, the conclusion to the Blue Ant trilogy, which feels like the most Blue Anty of the books in the trilogy.

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I tried out a new App called WalkCast today developed by oio studio.

They bill it as a “Story Telling Engine,” which is definitely more snappy than saying it’s an: AI powered – location based – narrative non fiction – podcast generator?

It’s quite a fun little app. I’m reposting their marketing video below, as I can’t seem to link directly to it:

How it Works

The app grabs your location, searches the web for information about where you are, generates a narrative text summary, and spits it out as audio. On the about page, they hint that there’s a lot more happening behind the scenes, but essentially that’s the experience.

Imagine it as a series of intelligent agents—curator, editor, and host—each with a distinct role in the creation of every story. The curator digs deep into your surroundings, finding facts and points of interest. The editor weaves these into a dynamic script, sometimes adding creative tangents and surprising twists.

Finally, the host—our AI-generated voice—delivers the story, always in the perfect tone. This loop continues as long as you keep walking, transforming every step into a suprising moment.

In the end, here at oio we’re on a mission to create products and tools for a less-boring future, and waiting for someone else to do it just wasn’t an option. So we built it ourselves.

I recently made an episode of 301 about Googles NotebookLM where I self inserted an AI version of my own voice into the ‘podcast’ it generated about my own work. I’ve also written about the weird issues that we are going to have to confront in the medium term.

But never the less, personality driven front ends for AI systems are an emerging UX paradigm and and WalkCast fits right into that space and have made something quite compelling. But having tried it, I also have some problems with it.

My Immediate Challanges

I went for a walk with the app this morning and experienced it twice (each session lasting about 7–10 minutes). The best way to describe it is that it felt like being ‘inside Wikipedia.’ The infosphere was narratively augmented over my direct physical environment.

For the first five minutes or so, it really does feel like a Location-Specific Experience. But as you continue to use the app, the narrative presentation about the place you’re in starts to feel flat.

One issue was the repetitive structure of the narratives. Each experience followed the same pattern: first, some facts about the immediate location, then a zoom-out to a broader area, followed by a tenuous metaphor. For example, I listened to a story about Seething Wells that morphed into a spooky ghost tale, which then swerved into an NPR-style metaphor about jellyfish (yes, jellyfish!) and tunnels, before zooming out to Surbiton and ending with another odd connection to fungi and arts and crafts. It was weirdly disjointed.

This brings up a bigger issue: narrative nonfiction ≠ story. A good story has structure, pacing, and a sense of direction, but WalkCast lacks that. There’s no feedback loop responding to the user’s actions or movement. Even museum audio guides provide more agency than this app by letting listeners control what they hear and when. I was expecting something more interactive—perhaps a ‘choose your own adventure’ vibe, where the app could suggest going left to learn about X or right to hear about Y.

Improvements

One of the key elements of augmented/spatial narrative design is that is that the audience is not just a witness to the narrative but are inside of it. WalkCast fails because there’s no story to be inside of, there’s no sequence of events, no sense making. It literally is just Wikipedia being pipped into your earholes.

A key insight that Rob is that when you are designing these sorts of experiences, there’s a tension between augmenting places and augmenting the player. And WalkCast should have a think about which paradigm they are working in what they have right now is a sort of location-portable / or site agnostic design. But there’s probably more value in remembering Rob’s second rule: the most important reality you are augmenting is the player themselves.

The experience could be massively improved by ditching the weird metaphors editorial and instead just refetch the user’s location as they walk. In a dense city like London, almost every street has an interesting history or a Wikipedia page. Updating the narrative in real time as you walk would create a more engaging and immersive experience. WalkCast needs to decide if they want to lean into narrative nonfiction or develop true stories. AI powered Wikipedia for your ears is going to get old really quickly.

I do however see huge potential in WalkCast, its a really fun little demo/toy. I’m looking forward to seeing how it and similar apps evolve.

The post WalkCast.FM appeared first on thejaymo.net.

Hot on the heels of reaching one thousand consecutive days of my photo-a-day project comes another big life milestone.

I Have Reached Enlightenment

Not in my spiritual practice—I’d never be so bold! Instead, I’ve achieved the top ‘Karma’ level in my to-do list app: Todoist. Aptly named “Enlightenment,” it’s a milestone I wasn’t necessarily chasing, but here we are.

So, you can all go home now. I’ve done all the things that need doing – there’s nothing left to do.

Todoist

Todoist ‘karma’ is a gamified part of the app that rewards users with points for completing tasks, meeting daily or weekly goals, maintaining productivity streaks, etc. As you accumulate points, you progress through different levels, providing a simple way to track productivity over time.

The congratulatory email said that ‘Enlightenment’ is an achievement unlocked by only 0.05% of users, so I guess I’m in rarefied air now.

I’ve written plenty of times about how lists define my life.
But Todoist entered the picture during my mid-twenties after I read Getting Things Done—a book that changed my life. Back then, the job I was in had strict software installation policies, so Todoist’s browser extension became my go-to for organising my chaotic work life. I can’t remember the exact date I signed up (it was with an email I no longer have access to), but it was way before their 2015 rebrand, so it’s been a long journey.

Looking back, my Todoist usage maps neatly to my personal and professional growth. I leaned on it during my tech consultancy job, where the overwhelming workload pushed me to seek structure. Later, it became a vital tool as I transitioned into project management and then operations. I’ve joked that my Todoist is probably the most organized part of the high-growth startups I’ve worked at.

When I quit all that and went freelance, however, I entered what I call my “wilderness years” with Todoist. During that time, I started using Notion for everything, especially around the start of 2020. I even recommended it to some friends at the company Yaya, when they were all hitting the limits of what Todoist could do for small teams. But back then, Notion wasn’t quite ready to replace Todoist for task management, at least not in a way that felt right for them.

During the lockdown, I leaned on Notion for managing my projects and writing, but over time, I’ve found its UX for project management… cumbersome. So, I returned to Todoist for my organization. Most productivity software, including Notion and Todoist, is built on the foundations of Getting Things Done so witching is always easy. What I appreciate most about Todoist is that it simplifies the process and doesn’t try to overcomplicate things with unnecessary features.

Todoist has since then remained a constant in my life. Even as other apps and systems have come and gone. I just think it’s the best productivity apps for simple task management. Which is why I always find my way back to it.

In fact, I’ve come to see people constantly switching from one productivity app to another in search of the ‘perfect app’ as a kind of advanced procrastination. Setting up productive apps from scratch has become a hobby for some people—as shown by the vast “grindset” industry on YouTube. I sometimes wonder if the audience for all that content ever gets things done. 

Speaking of getting things done, here’s the one core truth I can impart from my enlightened position:

If It’s Not Written Down, It Doesn’t Exist.

This principle is at the heart of GTD and is fundamental to countless other productivity frameworks and apps. The idea is simple: get everything out of your head so you free up mental space for more creative or critical thinking.  I don’t particularly like the term ‘second brain,’ but if it works for you, think of it that way. Once it’s written down, you don’t have to stress about remembering the details—you’ve offloaded that onto a system you trust.

Years ago now, I wrote about being a “notebook and a list” guy. Which is why Todoist resonates with me so strongly—I simply love lists. There’s something uniquely satisfying about crossing tasks off. Other systems, like Kanban or more visual tools, are fine, but none provide the same satisfaction as a simple tick in a box.

One of my favorite features of Todoist is recurring tasks. For things I need to remember every week, month, or year, I just set it once, and Todoist handles the rest. It’s a small feature, but it’s a game changer for keeping my life organized without cluttering my brain.

I keep several top-level projects in Todoist, aligned with the yearly themes or vectors I set at the beginning of each year. Sub-projects may lay dormant for months until they suddenly become relevant again—like the ones for holidays or special occasions. Every Wednesday, I review my tasks in Todoist to see what’s left to complete by the end of the week and what can be carried forward. Without this habit, I’d lose track of everything I need to do given my naturally chaotic tendencies.

The karma system has been motivating too. I might in fact email Todoist and ask if they can reset my Karma—starting again might add a fresh challenge.

One of the things I appreciate most about Todoist is its slow and steady development pace. Unlike other apps that rush to release new features, Todoist focuses on meaningful quality-of-life improvements—sometimes for months and years at a stretch.

I’ve been part of their beta program for a long time now and have seen firsthand how the app evolves based on user feedback. Small tweaks, intuitive improvements, and user-friendly polish are the hallmarks of Todoist’s development approach. Several times, I’ve sent feedback and found the behaviour in the app changed a week later—super cool.

If you’ve found this post while researching Todoist reviews, give it a try. It works for me, and I think it could work for you too. But whether or not you use Todoist, my one piece of grindset advice, coming from my so-called state of Enlightenment, is this:

If it’s not written down, it doesn’t exist.

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I had a drink with Matt Webb the other day and I was telling him about all the ‘History of Computing‘ books I’ve been reading over the last few years.

Here’s the list as of July 2024:

John Atanasoff prototyped the Atanasoff–Berry Computer (ABC) in 1939 and influenced the ENIAC creators a great deal. Whilst the ABC is neither programmable, nor Turing-complete, it is the first machine with an ALU (arithmetic logic unit) which is found in every modern processor’s design.

I’ve put this book on the list first as all the other books I’ve read focus on ENIAC and Mauchly and Eckert’s careers. The key moment in this book is the Sperry Rand Patient lawsuit which (as the blub says) paved the way for the personal computing revolution.

This book is a breezy read. The tone of the author is great. It covers in a great deal of detail the creation of ENIAC. All the pressures of wartime and budgets, funding etc. All the backroom deals and rivalries that emerged too. It’s actually quite a gripping read at times.

The later half of the book covers the other side of the lawsuit mentioned above – one the pair ultimately lost.

Correcting a huge omission from McCartney’s history of computing book on ENIAC above, Proving Ground covers the day to day lives of the first computer programers working on ENIAC. The context of WW2 is important and well integrated into the narrative, as it allowed these amazing women to do work they did. It also makes the important point that whilst Mauchly+Eckert designed the machine .. these young mathematicians straight out of university figured out how to program it by themselves – mostly theoretically – using pen and paper and chalk boards.

Bonus: here’s an excellent and humorous interview with one of the programmers featured in the book, Jean Jennings:

I actually found this book riveting, couldn’t put it down. This book takes a cool approach to its subjects by going back in time and introducing the each of the men involved by taking us though the lives of their grandparents and then parents. The story is very human and has lots of detail. When the story of the semiconductor kicks of proper, the author had access to the teams lab note books and you get a real play by play of what went on and when.

The final 1/3 of the book covers the deep interpersonal animosity that emerged between the three semi-conductor transistor inventors. Post invention the story mostly follows William Shockley’s career kickstarting Silicon Valley by being a hopeless manager and then his re-invention as a crazy racist in later life.

When you start reading this, you’ll think that it’s going to cover all the same stuff as the book above, but the invention of the transistor is only covered in the first 20% or so. It then picks up where Crystal Fire left off. The development of Silicon Valley as an industry etc. The books main focus is on the integrated circuit. The rivalry between Texas Instruments and Intel, Sony and kaizen etc, Lynn Conway’s work at IBM and Xexrox on integrated chip design which kickstarted the silicon foundry model we still have with us today.

Two things that stand out in my memory as a type – 1. The long section describing how a scientific calculator works, zooming in from the screen and buttons all the way to the micro hertz pulses coming from the clock and instructions happening in the memory. Very understandable and very readable! 2. That todays Silicon chip industry should be seen as an extension of the printing press and watch making industry.

An in depth history of Bell labs. iI covers all the major discoveries but does not focus on any one for too long in particular. There’s a lot in here about running and working for a huge organisation that has continuity over generations! and the need for pure research in the corporate world. Great book. Don’t bother reading that recent viral thing on Substack about Bell Labs, read this instead.

Seymour Cray is a legend! Talking to elves in the tunnel you’re digging under your house is how we should be solving all our problems. Speaking of which: There’s a lot of “why” engineering decisions and “how” problems were resolved in this book. As well as being a humorous look at an upstart entrepreneur and a genius. Some of the ‘how to build a business with out loosing your soul’ parts in this are also really good!

Oh if only we could all write like Kidder! This book chronicles the creation of Data General’s Eclipse MV/8000 computer from the engineers’ point of view. It highlights that working conditions at tech companies were just as awful in the 80’s as they are now. This book exposed ‘Mushroom management’ for the first time, as well as describing self imposed crunch. The ‘Soul’ of the machine in the book comes from the engineers who develop the computer. Pulitzer prize winning classic.

This book covers the history of the Internet. The ins and out’s of DARPA, and ARPA. Military money and the importance of having people with long term vision. There’s a LOT in this book. Lots of great people making clear and far sighted decisions who deserve to be more well known. As the narrative progress the story zoom’s in on BBN (Bolt Beranek and Newman Inc) who built the first Interface Message Processors for the ARPA net, Designed TCP/IP etc. The last 1/4 of the book covers what happened ‘after’ everyone got connected to the internet but before the eternal September began. It did come out in 1996 after all.

This book is really really good. But it’s also super frustrating. As you read, you won’t belive how short sighted Xerox as a company were. It’s interesting to compare the management and corporate events in this book to The Idea Factory. This book covers the work of Ted Nelson and the Alto computer, the Xerox Star – as well as the invention of the Intranat and a host of other technologies like the LCD, laser disk and 3D rendering.

The last book on the list, but by no means least. Chip War covers almost all everything in the books above but at a really high level. It situates the semiconductor industry geopolitically and explains the economic contexts for a lot of events that happen in the other books – in particular Japanese chip reliability in the late 70’s and 80’s with Sony, and then it’s shift to Taiwan as part of their industrial policy. Global supply chains and bottlenecks etc. It also covers some of the history of Russian computing which I haven’t read about elsewhere.

I really recommend this book and it’s a must read to fully understand the shape of geopolitics in 2020’s.

The post 🗒️ History Of Computing Books appeared first on thejaymo.net.

Paul Czege was kind enough to send me a review copy of his newest zine Inscapes: How the Worlds We Make Make Us Who We Are.

“A zine of insights from my play of immersive journaling games. What happens when worlds take hold in us? What makes us real?”

If you are interested in immersive storytelling, Solo RPG journaling games, or simply curious about the ways in which the worlds we create can shape our lives, the Kickstarter is currently running and has just 5 days left!

Inscapes is the follow up to 2023’s The Ink That Bleeds – which as I’ve said before – is probably the single most important thing I read last year. My quote about it is even on the Kickstarter page!

In TITB Paul explored his journey into solo journaling games. And served as both a reflective analysis on the medium and as practical guide to help readers fully immerse themselves in, and benefit from, these experiences.

If TITB was an introduction, this text picks up right where the previous zine left off, a sequel of sorts. But I don’t think knowledge of the first book is strictly necessary.

Inscapes deepens and furthers Pauls understanding of what is ‘going on’, when we meet and make friends with people in our unconscious. And what is going on ‘between the worlds’ of the imaginal and the mundane.

As with TITB, Inscapes includes sections of example of play, mixed in with commentary, games design insights and (frankly) some super experimental metaphysics.

The example play extracts are provocative, intense, and at times heartbreaking. As I was reading yesterday I had to remind myself at time that I wasn’t reading fiction. Instead they are an instantiation or rather an upwelling from his unconscious – a very private thing . As the people, or friends Paul makes in the games are – (for the most part imo) – manifestations of his own unconscious.

He takes accusations of ‘self delusion’ (a common refrain from critics of solo RPG journaling games) head on too. I know that the TITB is popular amongst narrative therapists, and Paul writes quite vulnerably about his own childhood trauma and how the play has helped him circle around some themes that have been recurrent throughout his personal life:

Perhaps because I’ve been injecting so much James Hollis into my brain, or because I’m currently writing my own long zine on solo RPG journaling game’s I loved this. Also I think this new medium is important, and Paul is one of the only people writing about them in this way. In fact, I think Solo RPG journaling games are at the bleeding edge of game design.

They are a Jungian psycho-technology.

Here’s a little extract from my own upcoming zine on the subject:

At its core, Inscapes is about worlds. The worlds we make for our selves, the worlds we inhabit, and the worlds that inhabit us. “We are made by our inscapes”.

I can’t recommend it enough.

You can back Inscapes: How the Worlds We Make Make Us Who We Are On Kickstarter Until July 21st

The post 📃 Inscapes | Solo RPG Zine Review appeared first on thejaymo.net.

Every Man For Himself

I’m currently listening to Werner Herzog’s memoir Every Man for Himself and God Against All.

He’s narrating it so from the first 30 seconds it’s found a place on my top 10 audio book of all time list. I’m about half way though and there’s already been some absolute ZINGERS.

This one made me laugh out loud.

“I have a deep aversion to too much introspection, to navel-gazing. I’d rather die than go to an analyst, because it’s my view that something fundamentally wrong happens here. If you harshly light every last corner of a house, the house will become uninhabitable . . . I am convinced that it’s psychoanalysis – along with quite a few other mistakes – that has made the twentieth century so terrible. As far as I’m concerned, the twentieth century, in its entirety, was a mistake.” ― Werner Herzog, Every Man for Himself and God Against All: A Memoir

Being a memoir the book can loosely be said to be chronological, but each chapter is so chock full of digressions, ‘I grew up in the mountains, I saw a really strong guy try to life a truck, I named a character after him in X film, and now i’m talking about milking cows and suddenly a meeting with NASA astronauts’. The whole book is written like this and it’s sort of like being inside a dream.

Not being a huge fan of the moving image I’ll admit right now that I’ve only seen a handful of Herzog’s film. But I do love him as an artist and in particular will instantly consumer any conversation he has with New York Public Library’s Paul Holdengraber.

This epic two hour conversation in front of a live audience is a particularly good one:

I saw an interview with him once and he recommended JA Baker’s The Peregrine and in it he said ‘everyone should read this book’ so I did, and I can see why.

The reason I’m reading Herzog’s memoir is because it’s come up in two separate conversations in the last few weeks. And I distinctly remember reading the Peregrine, because someone else had mentioned they were reading it the night before in the pub.

I very rarely read/watch/listen to something just because someone told me to read it. But if someone else brings it up too… Then maybe the universe is trying to tell you that you need to check it out. I am a really strong believer in this kind of synchronicity.

When it happens, when a piece of media, or a symbol is trying to reach you and you should act on it. I feel like this sort of organic, word of mouth, spread is a much better media filter than anything else.

Advertising is of course the opposite – a forced reaching out though ubiquity, other times it can be sheep/crowd stuff – everyone is talking about x because everyone else is talking about x. This sort of self re-enforcing process is a sure fire way of my wanting to develop some strategic indifference about whatever the thing is.

The other route of course is when a singular object calls out to you, in a shop or in the library ‘read me‘ it says. You know you have to given in and do it. Even if you have no idea what it was about Ryu Murakami’s In the Miso Soup was one of those books when I was working at the bookshop.

SSRZ #010

A little reminder that issue #010 of my Zine ‘Start Select Reset’ went out to paid subscribers at the end of June.

If you would like one, do subscribe! I’ve got a couple of issues left in stock. A big thanks recent subscribers too! I really do appreciate the support.

Just 4 more subscribers at any level and I’ll treat myself to a laser printer which will smooth out the production process greatly!

Permanently Moved

First Person Memory

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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Photo 365

The Ministry Of My Own Labour

• Read a great deal about ASL-3 Evaluations for Autonomous Capabilities in AI
• Went back and re-read the Ontological Hardness work from Venkat and Josh Stark and made lots of notes
• Sound check with Ecogradia podcast – interview next week
• Book some expert calls for the worlds book
• Wrote up some notes ready for Wolf Pod next week.
• Set up a Notion for a project that I hope is going ‘to go somewhere’
  • Wrote lots of things in said Notion

Terminal Access

Paul pointed out something interesting after linking to the ‘Culture is an Ecosystem’ Manifesto thats been doing the rounds on the back channels, which I assume everyone that follows me has already read.

you could say that poptimism can be read as the embracing approach to hyperreality, in the Baudrillardean sense of that concept: popular forms are popular not for their innate qualities, but rather for their popularity. Surface over substance.

Dipping the Stacks

Hallucinating sense in the era of infinity-content

we are newly free to renegotiate the metaphysical parameters of our reality. That may sound like hyperbole, but when we consider the degree to which the technology of writing contributed to our linear understanding of time, why wouldn’t this age of neural media enable us to experience time differently?

The Birth of Breaking News

The completion of the US transcontinental railroad in 1869 in Utah was also the birthplace of the newsflash. The news was delivered via telegraph through a clever scheme: the famous golden spike and a silver hammer were each wired to the telegraph so that when hammer struck nail, the circuit completed and the news raced out along telegraph wires to the rest of the nation.

Some People with Insomnia Think They’re Awake when They’re Asleep | Scientific American

He believes those with interrupted REM experience this arousal repeatedly and never reach the typical quiescent state that allows for the processing of troubled emotions.

Evolve or Die: Is this the End for Sword and Sorcery?

The iconography of sword and sorcery is as formalised as that of the Western, with which it shares an interest in mythologised history, rugged individualism and the wild frontier. But an iconography unexamined often falls prey to formula, especially when combined with the narrow demands of adventure fiction.

“Bits of the Mind’s String” – by Julian Simpson

In her essay “On Keeping A Notebook”, Joan Didion refers to “bits of the mind’s string”. These are pieces of who we are set down on a page and back-linked, to borrow terminology from the notebook’s digital cousin, to a vivid snatch of life experience.

Reading

I’m currently re-reading William Gibson’s Pattern Recognition. I first read it 15 years ago maybe? It’s such a good book. I’d forgotten. I’ll be on Wolf Podcast talking about it at some point over the summer. We’ll be talking working our way through the books in the trilogy month by month.

I finished the Horus Heresy Anthology book Tallarn. Whilst the book is written by one author John French, the form of the novel is really interesting. A series of progressively longer and longer interconnected short stories, couple with a few vignettes about major events ‘off screen’ so to say. It was good.

I flew though 5,000 Words Per Hour: Write Faster, Write Smarter by Chris Fox. What a waste of time. Here’s my Goodreads review: Let me save you some time. the big trick to writing that much is ‘write that much’

Xiu Xiu – Common Loon

I saw on reddit that the single Common Loon is my fav producer John Congleton’s newest credit. I have heard Xiu Xiu show up on many playlists over the years but I’ve clearly not spent enough time with them. This song is fantastic, I love the beefiness of the guitar distortion and the way that the vocal float inside the riff. Its a really great rock song. Sounds really contemprary too.

The video is … quite something. Staring and directed by Alicia McDaid (Who you might also know as Disgusting Feminist or @mcdazzler)

I’m going to try and make time to go back and listen to Xiu Xiu’s nearly 2 decades of back catalogue. Luckily I have a few train rides to and from central London, should be able to get though it.

Remember Kids:

The post Every Man For Himself appeared first on thejaymo.net.

Antisocial Network

I’m not one for TV of any kind, but after listening to the recent New Models interview the directors of The Antisocial Network on the paid subscriber feed, I watched it with Eve on Netflix the other night.

It’s a fantastic film. Charting the long and deep shadow that 4chan casts over western culture and the internet at large.

I spent far too much time on 4chan from about 2005-8ish and then got sucked back in during the OpChan protests. My views on the time I spent/this period of my life online are mixed. Especially as much later trolls tried to destroy someone very close to me’s reputation and life – which i’m not going to speak about at all – but its hard not hold a grudge.

But, all through the late 00’s/Early 10’s I used to semi-regularly go to chan meet ups in Central London. We all called each other by our alt/screen names in the London region IRC channel we in. The meet ups themselves were a menagerie of proper sorts of shut ins and weirdos – as you can imagine.

The documentary does a good job of capturing the energy of this early period of the site. The excitement around global protest etc materialising from cyberspace IRL, and explaining how it soured after the occupy movement. Biella’s book on this era is fantastic.

There’s a part of me that thinks the darkness of Gamergate and Qanon etc could have been avoided if ‘the left’ had done more to acknowledge Anon’s online activities during Occupy and the Student Movement (DSG tried). ‘The left can’t meme’ became a meme because the left withdrew from this arena as a site of struggle – despite inventing it.

I like how the film breaks the history in to different era’s and uses some stunning animated interludes to illustrate some of the metaphors around what was happening, and what was changing online. What was happening to people involved, and on the wider social platforms.

I don’t think I’m giving anything away when I say that the film towards the end makes the case that 4chans ‘Touch Grass‘ meme is probably its most important contribution to Internet culture in recent history.

If I was programming a film festival, I’d show the anti-social network.

As well as the 2020 documentary TWF no GF – which is fantastic but got lost in pandemic madness.

I think i’d also show 2012’s We are Legion

And probably the first Zeitgeist film. As it speaks to a time when the left was far more tolerant of conspiracy thinking and its influence on Occupy was considerable.

Anyways, watch the Antisocial network it’s really good.

As I mention further down in #reading I picked up Pure Invention: How Japan’s Pop Culture Conquered the World by Matt Alt – who’s interviewed for the film. Whats remarkable is that so much of whats happening in/to our culture happened a decade ago in Japan. Alt’s book combined with Hiroki Azuma’s Otaku: Japan’s Database Animals gets you. 90% of the way there into/with understanding what the hell is going on.

Permanently Moved

Algorithmic Pressure

People I hang out with online all at once seem to have begun questioning the necessity of weekly creative production. 

Full Show Notes: https://thejaymo.net/thejaymo.net/2024/05/25/2410-algorithmic-pressure/

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Photo 365

Important PSA down by the river from local artist Stevexoh

The Ministry Of My Own Labour

• Writing my talk for Lisbon
• Notes to a compnay
• Sent a little voice note off to No Tags podcast
• Still working on my ‘The most impossible object’ essay
• Final E.C edit passes for Season 2
• Learning about current state of AI powered ‘Little Computer People’ games – 3 calls with different teams.
• Lunch with Ben Vickers in central

I’m still open for new projects. Get in touch if you think you can make use of my thoughts/skills!

Terminal Access

You must all know by now that attention is one of my favourite topics. The Time spent off newsletter had a great post on the subject it this week:

Then one day, years after I quit social media and stopped waking up to the news, reality shifted. The world became mostly good; People mostly good; I, too, mostly good. This is my reality now. No, I’m not trying to convince you of such reality, just like you can’t convince me otherwise. Because in my reality, in the world I pay attention to and experience with all my senses— sight, sound, smell, taste, and touch — the world is mostly good, people are mostly kind and wonderful, and I, too, like most people am good and wonderful most of the time.

ICYMI On the Blog

🟧 Default Apps 2024

My ‘Default Apps’ as of Summer 2024

One D&D’s New Covers

The two images illustrate the fundamental split over what players think Dungeons & Dragons is for

Dipping the Stacks

Build Worlds – Part II – John French

The truth is that we are not trying to build real worlds, we are trying to build worlds that feel real.

The visionOS Experience

I’ve been taking notes and now have too many words about the design of visionOS:

We Have Always Lived with Fearmongers – by M L Clark

a death in March finally made its way to The New York Times obituaries, where it served as an unpleasant reminder of superstitious nonsense gripping our culture in a very real and disruptive way, just a few decades prior.
Bennett Braun was a psychiatrist who played a significant role in the Satanic Panic of the 1980s and 1990s

A Culture of Introspective Captivity – by P.E. Moskowitz

introspection can become somewhat of a trap—a system by which you control yourself so that you do not disturb the peace of the world outside of you.

Sony Is Finally, FINALLY Changing Its Stupid Product Names – Aftermath

The main reason for Sony’s new naming convention is to expand recognition by adopting a more memorable and understandable name for customers”, which, look, I’m just a guy who writes on the internet, not a highly-paid corporate branding expert, but that seems like it should have been a priority…a long time ago?

The fact Sony is the company that invented the ‘Walkman’ and Playstation’, their product code naming in their modern consumer device range has always baffled me.

Reading

I finished Jonathan D Beer’s debut Warhammer Crime novel The King of the Spoil. Absolutely fantastic story. Full set up and open for a sequel and I love the borrowing of characters from other peoples novels. As I said last week. Not so much a ‘who dun it’ but a ‘Why dun it’, If you’re a fan of cyberpunk I think this might be a good gateway novel in the world of warhammer.

I read all of Indistractable: How to Control Your Attention and Choose Your Life by ‘Hooked‘ author Nir Eyal. Whilst the book opens with the irony that the guy who literally wrote the book on how to make your app more addictive is now writing a book about putting your phone down, I would have likes just a little more self reflection.

I finished reading James Hillman’s Force of Character. And I read How to Land: Finding Ground in an Unstable World by Ann Cooper Albright

Been a big week for books!

I started listening to Matt Alt’s Pure Invention: How Japan Made the Modern World after the directors of the new Netflix documentary on 4chan ‘The Antisocial Network’ name checked it as a major resource for their film SUPER interesting so far!

Tidal Memory Exo – Iglooghost

Iglooghost has a new album out. A world building exercise, sonic design fiction set in an alternate reality version of my hometown:

“Tidal Memory Exo is an album I made while living in a rust-ridden flooded squat in a weird UK seaside town. The area has been in an endless storm, causing strange otherworldly primordial garbage to be washed to shore. It’s basically only populated by rogue junk-hoarding scrap weirdos right now. I’ve been trying to get involved in the music scene that’s bubbling up locally. There’s lots of weird new mutated genres and illegal radio stations popping up – completely isolated from the rest of the country because of this massive storm. They don’t really like me, but I sort of wormed my way in and finally got this album together. Tunes about oceanic scum, illegal teletext transmissions, & the prehistoric trilobite angels lurking in the sewers.”

I was waiting in Outernet on TCR on Wednesday sheltering from the rain. Reading a book about Outaku, listening to this album. Felt like some kind of weird parody of myself.

Remember Kids:

The post Antisocial Network appeared first on thejaymo.net.

A review of HG Wells’ most important work, Little Wars. The book that changed the way table top war games were played and paved the way for the development of role-playing and modern war games.

Full Show Notes: https://thejaymo.net/2024/04/20/2405-little-wars-of-the-worlds/

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April 20, 2024

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Permanently Moved 🔊 | Review 📃 | World Running 🌐

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I have finally gotten around to reading HG Wells’ most important book – Little Wars.

Or to give the full 1913 title upon publication: ‘Little Wars: a game for boys from twelve years of age to one hundred and fifty and for that more intelligent sort of girl who likes boys’ games and books.’

Which unfortunately sort of set the tone of wargaming towards women for the next 110+ years. And as for other social and cultural sensitivities, the book goes downhill from page one. In fact, my 2015 reprint has a note in the front matter forewarning the reader “that the text in places contains cultural references characteristic of the era, which may be deemed offensive by modern standards.” All that aside, Wells’ Little Wars still influences tabletop wargames today. 

The book began life as two articles published in ‘Windsor Magazine’ in December 1912 and January 1913. Little Wars and Floor Games. Apparently after their publication, the publisher Frank Palmer approached Wells and asked if a book might not be written on the subject of boy’s games.

The story goes that Wells soon showed up unannounced at Palmer’s office in Bloomsbury lugging huge boxes filled with lead soldiers, bottle brush trees and other terrain. Interrupting a meeting between Palmer and author R. Thurston Hopkins, he proceeded to crawl around on his hands and knees extolling the virtues of the game from the office carpet for over three hours. Finally, an exhausted Palmer (and presumably Hopkins) gave Wells a contract. Behaviour that sets the tone for how wargame nerds enthuse about their hobby to innocent social victims to this day too.

Little Wars marks the moment when toy soldiers had becoming serious objects. Wells explains that when he was a boy, toy soldiers used to be flat – pressed and stamped out from tin sheets with bent tabs to allow them to stand. Whereas by the 1910’s they were now hollow cast, painted and mass produced. He describes the toy soldiers as “magnificent beings”. And calls the advances in production as an “enormous improvement in our national physique in this respect.” He also effervesces about the vast collections of models that people can amass.

As an aside; in a consulting conversation the other day about worlds and IP, Warhammer and Games Workshop came up. I pointed out that it was Citadel Miniatures and not IP that built the company. GW is above all, an engineering firm. In the business of selling war dollies made with cutting edge injection plastic moulding machines.

Anyways.

Wells’ Little Wars of course do differ from tabletop wargames as we know them today. Primarily, battles are fought using actual projectiles rather than dice roles to resolve combat. In the Victorian period, the cost of mechanical springs fell dramatically. Making them economical for the inclusion in toys. Wells writes: “The beginning of the game of Little War, as we know it, became possible with the invention of the spring breechloader gun.” Some elements of the rules are recognisable to us today, like the deployment phase. But our familiarity is soon shattered with the requirement of a curtain to be hung in the middle of the arena whilst the players set up their armies. The combat phase then follows exactly like you would imagine. With the clicking of buttons and the firing of tiny projectiles across the room towards their targets. Presumably whilst making pew pew noises the whole time.

Despite the subject matter Wells’ lifelong pacifism is on display throughout the book. He says that wargames are a “homoeopathic remedy for the imaginative strategist. Here is the premeditation, the thrill, the strain of accumulating victory or disaster—and no smashed nor sanguinary bodies, no shattered fine buildings nor devastated country sides”. Published one year before World War 1, Wells seems prescient in writing: “Great War is at present, I am convinced, not only the most expensive game in the universe, but it is a game out of all proportion. Not only are the masses of men and material and suffering and inconvenience too monstrously big for reason but—the available heads we have for it, are too small. That, I think, is the most pacific realisation conceivable, and Little War brings you to it as nothing else but Great War can do.”

The book closes with an appendix on the military simulation Kriegspiel – German for War-game or War-play – and a tributary further up the timeline in my book on the history of worlds.

Wells notes that after the publication of the original articles, many military men got in touch. Kriegspiel they said “as it is played by the British Army, is a very dull and unsatisfactory exercise, lacking in realism, in stir and the unexpected, obsessed by the umpire at every turn”. Whilst protesting that as a civilian, Kriegspiel is not his ‘proper business’ Wells, like any good wargamer goes on to suggest advanced rules to be played in a larger space involving military logistics, military engineers, cavalry charges, and railway transport of troops etc – a complexification of the base simulation.

One I was of course, reading with an eye toward any mention of worlds. And found; within a discussion of terrain, this:

“These we arrange and rearrange in various ways upon our floor, making a world of them. In doing so we have found out all sorts of pleasant facts, and also many undesirable possibilities” Another early hit at something  – the worlds as a medium – are doing for us today.

All in all, despite its quite shocking casual racism, it’s an interesting book.

The post Little Wars of the Worlds | 2405 appeared first on thejaymo.net.

I wrote briefly about Day One back in Weeknotes 287. Just over a year later, I thought I’d write about it a bit more, as Day One is some of best money I’ve ever spent on software.

Day One

Journalling Journey

For about 10 years, I used Google Docs for my online journaling. A new file for every month, 12 files in a folder every a year. Each file was titled with the month number, month name, and year, e.g., ‘04 APR 24.’ During the 4 years previous 2013 I half-heartedly used a now defunct journalling app called OhLife. It would send an email every day at 6pm and then you could reply to, and the entry would be stored in your online journal.

A feature I loved in OhLife is that after a while, at the bottom of the email every day it would start to include an old entry: “435 days ago you wrote this: blah blah blah“. That random resurfacing of memories is some what of a hit and miss feature across most of our personal / private services. Apple and Google photo apps both generate ‘memories’ for example. I’m often indifferent to this feature on google photos, but I really do like old diary entries being re-surfaced.

Discovering Day One

In January last year, I finally invested in a proper journaling app and chose Day One. Mainly because its owned by Automattic, but it also is – as far as I can tell – also the best app on the market. After I got the app, I immediately fell in love with the UX and the fact it has a light weight markdown text editor for input, and decided to go all in. After deciding to switch, it took about three months (doing a little bit every day) to find, copy, paste, and back date , locations and metadata of old journal entries etc And I finished the process on 26th March 2023

since the beginning of the year I’ve been copy pasting my diary from all its the various formats that I’ve used over the years (OhLife emails (I lost my json export) .txt files, markdown files, Google docs etc) into the Day One app from Automattic. 1220 entries beginning August 2009. Since the new year I read and reviewed a great deal of my adult life moving it from one place to another.

It’s been quite interesting and a bit of an emotional experience. Glad it’s over.

Having a complete record of ones life in a searchable online database in Day One is WILD. Since March last year, I’ve been journaling daily in the Day One App. Not just because I like routine, but the app is quite frankly a joy to use.

How I Use Day One

Day One’s organisational logic is broken down by ‘Journals’ making it easy to categorise content. Where you put your entries.

My Day One Journal is currently broken down into several main Journals:

• Life Journal is my daily brain dump
• Band Names A monthly entry as a place to store the ‘good band names’ that come up in conversation. We started writing these down during in 2021.
• Commonplace Book Random quotes or thoughts that are worth capturing
• Photo-a-Day If you read this blog then … you’ll know that I’m into year 3 of taking a photo every day
• Poems I’m an emo kid! I’ll write a poem every now and then alright?
• Dreams A fairly new journal as inspired by the Lost xplorers podcast I decided I should finally start logging these.

And then I have a couple of transient journals for thoughts and notes about things currently ‘on going’ that will probably be lifted out of Day One and put into deep storage in notion and archived once the project ends.

I currently have have two major unbroken streaks 455 days in my Life Journal, and of course 822 photos in my Photo-a-Day journal.

Some people use a single journal like a scrap book with each entry having text and photos inside of it, or they might have a mixture of multiple text and image posts entered on the same day. I tend to do the former in my main Journal. This morning I wrote about going to the pub with some friends for lunch on easter sunday and pasted in some photos of us around the table etc.

You can also #hashtag things in Day One, which is nice for organisation and useful when combined with the universal search. Which is probably one of the killer apps. Being able to search over a decade’s worth of diary entries is really quite something.

On This Day

The other thing I enjoy is ‘On this Day’ feature. You can set a notification on your phone, and the time of day it pings you if you want. Obviously you need lots of entries for this to be a ‘killer feature’, but having put over 15 years of my life into Day One, some mornings I’ll look though my On this Day and shock my self that X event was 12 years ago or whatever.

Also because it only shows you entries ‘on this day‘, as you roll though the year you can begin to pick out the seasonal patterns in your life: when Hayfeaver starts, Depression, Optimism about something Etc. As long as you write about it in yoru journal. Its also begun to change the way I take photos for my photo-a-day. Sometimes its deliberately a photo that will be useful when they show up the following year. In fact, several photos I’ve taken this year are before/after photos of things either 1/2/3 years apart – but the only one who’s ever going to know this is me – in context in Day One.

The other thing about On This Day feature is that the leap year date can be used a sort of message in a bottle. A hidden entry that you can send yourself messages that you will only receive every 4 years. This year I wrote myself about 30 questions to answer about how I’m getting on.

Now that a year has passed since the big ‘digital lift’ I’m considering going though my old notebooks / paper journals that go back to 2004 and I might take photos of them with Microsoft Lens and OCR my terrible hand writing and put them all in to. but that would be a *real* can of emotional worms. lol.

Anyways. If you keep a journal, especially a digital one, its worth paying for Day One and diving in.

Side Note

Despite moving all my personal journals into Day One, my monthly Google Doc hasn’t gone away. Well, it did for a little while, but I found that I still needed somewhere that could be used as a scratch pad for writing, draft emails, and ideas without a home. So in late summer, a few months after abandoning them for Day I ended up firing up a Google Doc at the beginning of each month and as and when required putting the date in and putting in an entry.

For about 6 months or so I’ve been experimenting with recording myself whilst i’m out on my daily walk. “Take a memo” style. With the advances in AI, speech to text has reached the point where its *good enough*. And then if you run the good enough transcription though GPTChat you can get something *quite usable*. Many of my podcasts, and longer bits of writing have begun life using this workflow in the last few months.

Going out for a 20min walk and coming home with 2k+ words of notes in a format that only needs a light edit to be useable is a real game changer. I put all this sort of stuff in my monthly Google Doc scratch pads. AND OF COURSE I use my bullet journal for day to day written notes, and todoist for running my life.

Permanently Moved

Internet Escape Velocity

You know how in the Persona games the main characters get sucked into the television? Internet Escape Velocity is the opposite. 

Full Show Notes: https://thejaymo.net/2024/03/30/2402-internet-escape-velocity/

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Start Select Reset

In case you missed it, the newest issue of my Zine went out to paid members of my IRL mailing list. I have 2 issues of last year’s Q4 issue left, so the next two subs to the mailing list will receive both on sign up.

Issue #010 is going to be A5 and quite big/special.

I’m self publishing two long 8k word essays and will audio narration for them. Sign up for £5 a month today to get it for free (I’m eating all the cost) rather than buy it from me at full price + shipping – probably about 25 quid.

Photo 365

The Ministry Of My Own Labour

I posted about the journal I’ve started editing and publishing with some online friends.

Also this week I was…

• Learning about the Philosophy of knowledge and modelling in economics from LSE text books 🫠
• Had a call with the people from Imagination Spectrum
• More invites sent for E.C season 2
• Spring clean of the flat began
• Writing Part 2 of Writing the Impossible Object
• Started making some business cards – because it’s 2004 not 2024?

Terminal Access

Rhyd Wildermuth over at From The Forests of Arduinna wrote and great article about The Persistence of Paganism and what’s really behind recent fears of a “pagan resurgence?” 🔒

That’s why, when the Roman Empire tried to codify the varying beliefs of the people it conquered and contained, it relied on the distinction between the civitas and the paganus, the urban and the rural. Urban beliefs, customs, and material modes of living became the standard against which all non-urban peoples were judged. The cities had formal temples and state-sanctioned priesthoods, while the rural had rudimentary shrines (often centred on sacred sites in nature) and informal priesthoods following a more shamanic method of initiation.

Dipping the Stacks

Immersive Ways of Live Storytelling Through Challenging Transmedia Universes: Rodrigo Terra Interviewed by Renata Frade and Bruno Valente Pimentel — Pop Junctions

In my conversation with Terra and mobile apps developer and VFX editor Bruno Valente Pimentel, we discussed experiences developing transmedia and storytelling strategies as well as how those strategies can be applied to engaging audiences in entertainment, education, audiovisual media, and business.

The Ellipsis is Widening the Gap Between Millennials and Boomers. Here’s Why

“People who use the ellipsis like that are not even aware that social media writing is capable of conveying passive aggressiveness and they’re definitely not being passive aggressive,”

After Shutting Down, These Golf Courses Went Wild – The New York Times

“We quickly recognized the high restoration value, the conservation value, and the public access recreational value,” said Guillermo Rodriguez, California state director with the nonprofit Trust for Public Land, which bought the San Geronimo course, in Marin County, for $8.9 million in 2018 and renamed it San Geronimo Commons.

What if meditation felt easy? with Naomi Annand

Apple’s CEO Tim Cook was recently quoted in Vanity Fair saying the Vision Pro is really good at helping with meditation. It’s part of how Apple is marketing the product. My immediate reaction to that is like “no, absolutely not, if you are using a $3,500 Apple device to meditate, you are not meditating.”

The transfluxor-powered Arma Micro Computer from 1962

What would you say is the first microcomputer?1 The Apple I from 1976? The Altair 8800 from 1974? Perhaps the lesser-known Micral N (1973) or Q1 (1972)? How about the Arma Micro Computer from way back in 1962

Reading

I finished Hardwired by Walter Jon Williams. Instantly taking a place in the top 5 Cyberpunk books of all time for me. I think I’m going to write a review of it – its that good. The book is free on audible if you a member.

I moved on from 1980’s cyberpunk to something completely different. I started listening to Letter from America: The Essential Letters 1936 – 2004 by Alistair Cooke. The version I have includes additional narration and context setting by BBC American correspondent Matt Frei. I don’t know much about Cooke at all – apart from his book America being on the shelf in my family home growing up. But 3 chapters in to his Essential Letters I already understand why he became a national institution.

Asake

Eve’s been listening to Nigerian pop music in the kitchen recently and certain songs have been on heavy rotation. Curious about the music coming out of the country thats slated to be the most populous country on earth by 2100, I jumped over to the Charts to check out whats going on. I found Asake.

His debut album Mr. Money with the Vibe released in 2022 and became the first debut album and first African album to have all its tracks occupy the top 10 spots on Apple Music at the same time. He has essentially become a megastar essentially over night. Follow up Work of Art was released last year and single Lonely At The Top.

Asake makes Afrobeat that seamlessly blends Amapiano – the Nigerian house genre that I think most people are familiar with. Work of Art is a great album and sounded super bouncy and very summery on a spring morning walk here in London. One of the things that I wonder about though, is does it sound optimistic and summery because its spring here?, or simply because its from Nigeria? A country that actually has a future.

My favourite song on the album is Sunshine. So good. Gonna be blasting this all summer for sure!

Remember Kids:

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November 4, 2023

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Permanently Moved 🔊 | Review 📃 | World Running 🌐

“Don Quixote” by Miguel de Cervantes, is hailed as the first modern novel. A unique blend of humor, tragedy, and critique nestled within a meta-narrative on chivalry and storytelling. Jay reflects on the enduring relevance of Don Quixote’s adventures through the lens of modern fan fiction and intellectual property debates.

Full Show Notes: https://thejaymo.net/2023/11/04/301-2336-why-don-quixote-is-so-great/

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Why Don Quixote is So Great

One of my favourite books of all time is Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes, and I’m going to tell you why.

I read it once as a teenager and I’ve read Edith Grossman’s 2003 translation twice as an adult. I have the paperback edition with Picasso’s sketch on the cover.

As I’ve grown older, the book has only got better. Not because the story has changed, but because I have. My understanding of the novel and its wider context has grown.

Don Quixote, is of course a story about an otaku shut-in named Alonso Quijano. A man who does nothing but read chivalric romances. Eventually, after collecting and consuming so many stories he loses his mind and decides to become a knight-errant himself. Seeking to revive chivalry in his modern era, he adopts the moniker of Don Quixote. And navigates the world of the novel, as if he were a character in a chivalric romance story. 

Long time listeners will of course immediately recognise this affliction or condition. Brainworms; acquired from the media he was consuming – the world he was immersing himself in.

Don Quixote is regarded as the first ever novel

The book is also a sort of meta-commentary on the narrative environment that Cervantes found himself working in. The pivot between the collective ownership of story and the authorial driven narrative form we know today.  

Most stories at the time – usually written under pen names – were versions or extensions of common oral tales passed from one person to another. Media that had emerged from a storytelling tradition that treats characters as a kind of collective property, shared. Think of high mediaeval chivalric romances as a kind of extended and shared permissive IP, or fandom universe.  

Cervantes’ other main innovation as an author and what makes it the first novel. Was to explore the psychological state of his characters. Still the defining feature of the novel as a form. We see the story play out through the eyes of Sancho Panza and Quixote, and we are privy to their inner lives and motivations.

In the chivalric romances, and more generally of fiction in this period, characters rarely ever explained themselves – if at all. If they did, they would usually do so in the form of a soliloquy or grandiose pronouncement.

So we have a character, who is navigating the world of novel through a world(view) adopted from the media he has consumed. Who goes off on adventures, (and due to his delusional obsession), gets in and out of tragic and comical situations. Don Quixote is a comment on the disconnect between the romantic imagination and the harsh realities of life. A critique of the unrealistic and impractical ideals of chivalric romance.

Don Quixote is also one of the first works of metafiction

The book comments on its own narrative form and even comments on the nature of storytelling itself. To explain why, we must turn our minds to the modern phenomenon of fan fiction. 

Like fan fiction, Don Quixote is a work in dialogue with both reader and genre. Contemporary readers would have been familiar with other chivalric romance stories and the conventions of the genre. Cervantes subverts both by having Quixote be a fan of the genre and operate by its conventions. If alive today, I imagine that he would have been writing all sorts of fan fiction and posting it on archive of our own and self publishing on Amazon.

Don Quixote was written in two parts. The first part was published in 1605. But 4 years after its publication, an unauthorised follow up called: “The Second Book of the Ingenious Knight Don Quixote of La Mancha” was published.

As you can imagine Cervantes was not a fan of this *at all*. And began writing his own follow up. To illustrate how incredibly meta this novel is, Cervantes puts the unauthorised sequel into the world of the book. As after all Don Quixote is a book about a reader of books.

In Part 2 Don Quixote visits a printing-house in Barcelona and finds the unofficial sequel being printed there. The character of Quixote then proceeds to read a real book about himself. Which, from his point of view (and the authors) is a complete fabrication. Later an irate Quixote and long suffering sidekick Panza then meet one of the characters from the unsanctioned sequel. They make him swear that the “other” Quixote and Sancho are impostors.

This self-referential meta commentary, to the reader, still feels incredibly modern. It illustrates the evolving literary culture of the time. There was a growing awareness of the literary marketplace and economic value of creative work. It takes a position on authorial intent, authenticity and literary value. All things that eventually birth copyright a hundred years later in 1710. Issues that in the age of AI, we are still wrestling with.

By responding to the unauthorised sequel, inside the world of the book and dismissing it, Cervantes engages with the very modern ideas of intellectual property and canon. The idea that someone can own or authorise character. Rather than collective stewardship of characters by multiple authors that had been tradition. 

There are 3 worlds nested inside the novel. Each porous to one another. The first is the characters psychological interiority, Inside the world of the book, written by a fourth wall breaking self referential author.

Honestly, if you haven’t ever read Don Quixote it’s very good.

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June 12, 2022

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Permanently Moved 🔊, Review 📃

I realised I knew very little about the history of computing. Here’s two books I recently correcting my ignorance. 

Full Show Notes: https://thejaymo.net/2022/06/12/301-2223-computing-books/

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Computing Books

I recently re-read Tracy Kidder’s 1982 Pulitzer Prize winning Non-Fiction book: The Soul of a New Machine. I first read it years ago, but re-reading in 2022 I was blown away by how good it is.

Finishing the book, I realised I knew very little about the history of computing.

We all, I presume, know the names of people like Johannes Gutenburg, Thomas Edison, Graham Bell, Tesla, and Berners-lee. But off the top of your head can you tell me who invented the Transistor? What about the Microchip?

I’ve read two books recently, correcting my ignorance. The first was:

Crystal Fire: The Invention of the Transistor and the Birth of the Information Age

Part of the ‘Sloan Technology Series’ published at the end of the last millennium. Given how much I enjoyed Crystal Fire I might pick up some of the other titles in the series. I have my ebay-eyes on Richard Rhodes’s Dark Sun, about the history of the hydrogen bomb. And Dream Reaper, about the development of farm machinery.

Crystal Fire follows the lives of the three men who shared the nobel prize for the transistor’s discovery. John Bardeen, Walter Brattain and William Shockley. The opening chapters trace the men’s family histories. Starting the story in the 1850’s with their grandparents. It tells concurrent stories of their families and the parallel story of developments in electricity and physics. It gives you a strong sense of the pace of discovery and upheaval in physics at the end of the 19th Century. The instrumentalization of electricity and the impact of quantum physics. All in one lifetime.

It goes on to cover the impact of the second world war, not only on the men’s lives, but on technology. The growing use of the valve amplifier in circuity for radar, radio and bomb switches etc.

One detail I found particularly interesting. When the US regulated the radio spectrum and stations for the first time in the 1920’s. The physics of how a crystal rectifier decoded radio signals was totally unknown. Radios were in millions of homes a decade later and still no-one knew how they worked – only that they did.

Post WW2 the story zooms in on Bell Labs’ transistor and semiconductor research group. Using original notebooks and interviews, we are taken day by day, week by week through a series of experiments and discoveries. It’s a wonderful vignette of Bell Labs in the late 40’s early 1950’s. Not so much Mad Man, but Nerd Men. Geeks in slacks and crisp white short sleeved shirts with pocket protectors. Proto space race drip.

The book then follows the three men’s lives post discovery, and post Bell Labs. John Bardeen, went on to become the only person to win the Nobel Prize for physics twice. First in 1956 for his work on semiconductors, and then again in 1972 for his work on superconductors. Walter Brattain, when asked about his semiconductor work in later life lamented. “The only regret I have about the transistor is its use for rock and roll”.

The final third of the book covers William Shockley’s cross country move from Bell Labs to California. Founding Shockley Semiconductor. Due to his insufferable management style, employees kept quitting. Starting their own firms – kickstarting Silicon Valley as we know it today. Shockley’s story also takes an astonishing turn in the late 70’s. With his transformation into a debate-me-bro racist. He spent the last years of his life spouting abhorrent views on race science and eugenics in the media.

The next back to back book I read was:

The Chip: How Two Americans Invented the Microchip and Launched a Revolution.

This book opens with the same cast of characters as Crystal Fire and the semiconductor research group at Bell Labs. But very quickly, people in supporting roles from the first book emerge now central to the new story. Jack Kilby and Robert Noyce – the inventors of the integrated circuit or microchip.

Other famous names like Gordon Moore – coiner of Moore’s law – and cofounder of Intel with Noyce show up too. Both men worked at Shockley Semiconductor before mutinying. Leaving to founding Fairchild Semiconductor, then in turn starting Intel.

The Chip, like Crystal Fire, is neither a biography, or a technical text. Instead, they both straddle the two modes carefully. Creating a very compelling narrative and educational text. For example, in addition to stories and histories of the men and companies involved. I came away from both books with a firm grasp of how things like; diodes, rectifiers, binary numbers, logic gates, and microchip manufacturing works.

The story that began in Crystal Fire is taken right up to the turn of the millennium in The Chip. The Chip covers the importance of the semiconductor to the space race and US missile program. Recounts the story of Texas Instruments’ pocket calculator, and just how revolutionary it was. Also fascinating, is the adoption of knowledge and expertise from the watchmaking and photographic worlds. Techniques borrowed from those industries are the foundation of the integrated circuit. We should consider the design and production of integrated circuits as an extension of the lineage of watch and clock making.

The book also covers the founders of Sony electronics and its history. How the Japanese semiconductor industry out-competed the American semiconductor industry with quality control.

Lastly, as with Brattain’s comment about the transistor and rock and roll. Years later, when asked about the invention of the integrated circuit, Jack Kilby lamented that it had created the mobile phone.

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The script above is the original script written for the episode. It may differ from what ended up in the edit.

If you’d like to support this blog and its various projects, please consider making a regular contribution here. It genuinely helps me keep things up and running, so thank you!

The post Computing Books | 2223 appeared first on thejaymo.net.

King Night vs Fires In Heaven

Burial’s 2007 Untrue is an album that defined a moment for my generation. When Ahmet Sabancı came to visit he told me he finally understood the album having seen London in winter at night in the rain.

Whenever I hear Untrue, I feel a sense memory of 5.30am bus rides to work in the rain. Playing the Phoenix Wright Ace Attorney series on my DS. Inhaling 3 or 4 books a week as the bookshop I worked in let us borrow them like a library service. It was the soundtrack to the Global Financial Crisis, and long train rides back to Kent to see an Ex.

My memories of 2010 are cloured with different hues and tones. The Cameron–Clegg coalition. The student Millbank revolt, The prospect of Endless Austerity. Fallout New Vegas and the Bitcoin Pizza. The Aforementioned Ex was now an actual Ex and I was miserable.

Then along came Witch House or Drag as it was then known. 

Witch House oozed into existence through cracks in reality via forums, music blogs, and p2p platforms like soulseek. Made by what we would then called Laptop Musicians disconnected from the ‘club scene’. Its only connection to club music being the paronomasia of the name.  All the early musicians cited Burial as a major influence in interviews. Dubstep wasn’t yet what it would become. Hyperdub’s Dubstep Allstars Vol 1 was released the same year as Witch House became ‘a thing’.

Parts of the press met the genre with skepticism and indignation. Incredulous that the internet could just declare a genre a ‘thing’ without any supporting context. Where was its megatextal topology? And also how dare artists choose to have ungooglable names like oOoOO , Gr†ll Gr†ll or ~▲†▲~ or  XXYYXX.

They were not barriers to the art. These names worked as signposts, sigils or signifiers. They were the first stirrings of online expression and identity that would go on to become Post-Internet Art.

The world is now dominated by microgenres and subcultures. Shaping perception of reality via niche hashtags and network effects. For better or worse someone at Spotify finds or makes up a genre name and then populates a playlist with content. The idea that people would get mad about an online genre having a name and coming from nowhere now seems quaint. But 2010 was a very different world. People still owned and controlled their own music collections. We carried iPods in the opposite jean pockets to our somewhat smartphones. 2010 was the year we got front facing cameras and the launch of Instagram. We were reading a thousand think pieces a day about selfies and their narcissism.

With the launch of Instagram came filters. I wrote a note on them back in 2012: on filters vs autotune.

Witch House is a musical genre drenched in drones and distortion. Beats chopped and screwed, nerve-jangling samples and gothic content. A tonal or emotional filter applied to the music. Its sonic palette wasn’t the faux nostalgia of an Instagram filter like 1977. But instead a saudadic anxiety for the future.

The title track of Salem’s 2010 album King Night sounds like the bad dream that we are still living though.

King Night’s opening track sounds like the expired film I was shooting on my ’91 Canon Sure Shot Max looks. 

Witch House sounded like neighbours having a party next door. It sounds like drowning your sorrows in the bath. It sounds like drug a comedown, ketamine binges and smartphone fuelled technological acceleration. Music by people with cracked versions of Fruity Loops or Reason. The turn of the decade was also the shift from desktop to laptop. Easy access to the tools of production allowed for experimentation. Music that an artist wanted to make, not what an audience wanted to hear.

The supporting context that the press was lamenting was actually the media environment they were embedded in. Pitchfork was still a kingmaker, Blogspots were posting and hosting weird LP rips as zip files, music came from Rapidshare or Megaupload. Twitter and Facebook were still nascent evils – the latter I’d already quit. I don’t think that Witch House would or could become ‘a thing’ today. There isn’t the media environment for it.
Spotify’s algorithms make careers. Not culture.

Grimes was still a long way from making RAXy power pop and dating Billionaires. I like to remind people that Grime’s first album was a DUNE concept album. I still remember standing in a basement in Shoreditch hearing a Witch House remix of Shadout Mapes flowing seamlessly into oOoOO’s Remix of Lindsay Lohan’s – I Live for the Day.

I was a very different person in 2010. The world was a different place too. The doom I felt in 2010 was a different doom to that of 2020. Everything I’ve lived through, the good and the bad was still on the horizon.

Witch (hehe) brings me to 2020’s Fires in Heaven. It … just sounds … so similar to King Night. I don’t feel that the album’s sensibilities are as dark as the first album. Nor is it as wonky, and with my old man crotchety production hat on – there is too much treble for my liking. 

This isn’t to say that it isn’t well produced – far from it. The album was mixed by Shlohmo. His 2011 album Bad Vibes remains a highlight of the decade. 

It’s not that I don’t like it, I do think it’s really well produced, and the tracks Starfall and Die With Me are excellent.

Salem are clearly still in the same place as they were in 2010. Less lonely perhaps. I mean; Salem’s Donoghue has a production credit on Kaneys ‘Yeezus’, so things can’t be all bad. My dissatisfaction with the album, I feel, is largely due to the last decade of doom that I’ve experienced. 

Witch House isn’t in the same place as 2010. During the intervening decade its oozed into pop culture as almost an aesthetic layer. It soundtracked movies throughout the early Twenty Teens. Ryan Gosling’s Drive has defined noir for the last decade. 

It’s devastating lo-fi synths and trap beats are now all over mumble rap and hip hop at large. Witch house has blended and fused with Synthwave. Its rode alongside developments in ambient and experimental.

It’s certainly present throughout all of Travis Scott’s career. Chance The Rapper even samples XXYYXX. The gothic vibes found in Billie Eilish’s Bury A Friend still ride the edge of Witch Houses’ influence in my mind.

The Tumblrs, Musicians and MySpace holdouts influencing Witch House in 2010 knew the world that we were being led towards was absolute bullshit. It’s aesthetics pressaged the return to Tarot Town we have arrived at. 

It’s blown out visuals and sonic landscape announced the coming decades ‘Witchy Fems’, Hex’s on Trump and the occult renaissance. How much conviction its cloak of aethetics had I’m not sure. But it was a starting gun for the rise of astrology and the death of consensus reality. 

In retrospect, Drag wouldn’t have been a bad name for it, had it stuck. 

Its strange artist names spoke to online performance of self and identity. The theatricality of the live shows (at least in London) suited that original name too. Basement venues draped in black cloth painted with blood red pentagrams. An audience off its face on the last of the legal mephedrone bought off the Internet from China.
Facing the Doom to come together.

When you make a witch house track the drone comes first. Then you chop the trap beats around the oscillations, last come the vocals. 

The sonic reality is created around the artist’s desire for vibes. 

Just like real life.

COME INTERNET WITH ME – GOTHLIME Searches ‘Nonograms’

Artist, Illustrator and Civil+Environmental Engineer Halima S. AKA Gothlime joins me for an hour of Internet.

We search ‘Nonograms’. Learn about the puzzles history and origins, read the rules, and spend quite some time attempting to solve some puzzles together, we find Nongram Pixel Art and discover the game ‘Bob PicRoss’.

Permanently Moved

Rooms As UX Metaphor

The Interactive Fiction metaphor of ‘rooms’ as applied to chat room UX.

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

The Ministry Of My Own Labour

• I’m still plugging away at NanoWriMo. It’s really exhausting. Considering I’ve just sold my first short story, this is the first time I’ve done it where I’ve thought that I might be able to do something with it eventually. I already know I need to cut like 5k out of the opening for pacing reasons.
• The next essay in the Dimensino is nearly ready. Its on ‘Permissive IP’s’ and ownership of culture in web3 environments. It’ll be out soon.
• Dimensino has become quite popular looking at my stats. Glad I’m doing it.

All my freelance work is now delivered and I’m looking for work in Dec. Get in touch if you’d like me to do some work for you.

Dipping the Stacks

Money Reimagined: The US’ Kodak Moment – CoinDesk

Can History Predict the Future? – The Atlantic

The Problem With Seraphine. My problem with Seraphine is kind of… | by Stephanie | Nov, 2020 | Medium (yikes)

Make Twitter Fun Again… By Taking Breaks from Twitter | Literary Hub

Reading

I’m still reading Disfigured: On Fairy Tales, Disability, and Making Space by Amanda Leduc. As mentioned in this weeks podcast I also read the IF Theory Reader.

Finite and Infinite Games arrived from ebay today. But as I said last week. I have like 12 books on the go right now.

I’m thinking of making Sundays a ‘no internet’ day and just reading.

Music

Salem aside I’ve been listening to Hot, Wet & Sassy by Tobacco. It’s a consistent album where every track stands on its own. There’s some abrasive tracks and some droney synth tracks here and there too. I like it.

Remember Kids

The post A Different Type Of Doom appeared first on thejaymo.net.

March 22, 2019

|

Permanently Moved 🔊 | Review 📃

S02E02

Review of Monica Gagliano’s: Thus Spoke the Plant: A Remarkable Journey of Groundbreaking Scientific Discoveries and Personal Encounters with Plants

Buy It!!

Amazon – Just Spoke The Plant 

Twitter – Monica Gagliano

Rune Soup Interview

You can subscribe to Permanently Moved in itunes: permanentlymoved.online/itunes or search in all your favourite podcatchers.

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

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Thus Spoke The Plant

Just before christmas last year I  tweeted somewhat rhetorically:

“Why doesn’t Monica Gagliano have a wikipedia page?’ 

At the time of writing – she still doesn’t. Answers of course on a postcard posted anywhere.

I don’t have a high opinion of wikipedia editors at the best of times. Partly from personal experience following run ins of various kinds. The mod community is full of insufferable smugness and self importance. This is before we even bring up their more widely known institutional sexism and extremist culture of scientism. Indeed, there is a lot of strong current of critique from Brazilian scholars about wikipedia as a colonial platform as an agent of cultural hegemony. Mainly seen through the lens of revert wars around Spiritismo and Indigenous knowledge that is taking place on Brazilian wikipedia pages. 

Why do I bring this up?

Because earlier this year from a paradise beach in Bali I wrote the following Goodreads review under Monica Gagliano’s newest book Thus Spoke the Plant: A Remarkable Journey of Groundbreaking Scientific Discoveries and Personal Encounters with Plants. Published by Penguin Random house late last year:

This is the most important book I’ve read this century

I am not joking.

The book is quite possibly one of the first ‘Post Enlightenment’ books written by a scientist. I have been telling basically everyone to read the book since. 

Monica Gagliano is a Evolutionary Ecologist who I believe, will at some point this century probably win a Nobel Prize for her groundbreaking work in Plant Behaviour and Cognition.  She has demonstrated the existence of memory in plants, that environmental factors teach plants to learn faster and forget slower. Some plants pass the test for respondent conditioning in a very similar sense to pavlov’s dogs. She is also a pioneer in the world of plant bioacoustics proving that plant roots use sound to locate water – and the list of her achievements goes on – and I hope continues. 

This is all very well I can hear you say.  But why exactly is this the best book you have read as an adult? 

Well, we all know that the 21 Century is already shaping up to be the century of biology. Just as the 20th was physics and the 19th Chemistry.

Firstly the fields that Gagliano is pioneering do not treat plants as objects – instead as other beings with agency and their own life ways. As Gordon mentioned in the Runesoup interview with her earlier this week: science has a mechanical view of the universe which causes us to invent the plant in our heads first and then confuse that mental picture for the actual plant. 

Coming from a animal behaviour background Gagliano seems to solve the problem of correspondence  In his essay A phenomenology with the natural world? (2014) Tim Ingold wrote the following:

“The problem in our relations with the natural world … is that we have forgotten how to correspond with the beings and things of which it is comprised. We have been so concerned with the interaction between ourselves and others that we have failed to notice how both we and they go along together in the current of time”

Tim Ingold –

A plant is a plant doing it’s plant thing all the time. A plant as verb, similar to the sign in bednobs and boomsticks when the cartoon animals say ‘No Humaning allowed’ To human as verb. Gagliano encourages us to rethink plants as people–beings with subjectivity, consciousness, and volition, and hence having the capacity for their own perspectives and voices

Ingold says that “If interaction is about othering, then correspondence is about togethering”

And it is with this concept of ‘togethering’ that brings me to the other element of the book. Perhaps the most important.. her personal journey. The book itself is also a “phytobiography”–a collection of stories written in partnership with plants. Gagliano is one of The Others in the Leary sense. In the book she bravely documents her up-close-and-personal encounters with the plants themselves, as well as with plant shamans, indigenous elders, and mystics from around the world and tells this story alongside her research journey.

To give you a flavour – At one point she was in Jungle performing a dieta with the bark of a tree whose spirit is associated with headlessness. As a result of the ritual the spirit of the tree told her exactly how to construct and design an experiment and told her to use peas instead of sunflowers.

There are many more stories in this book like this, from psychedelic visions helping her solve difficult life puzzles to another plant showing exactly how plants and animals breath one another into existence. To return my wikipedia rant for a moment. It never ceases to amaze me that when Shamans tell people that it was the tobacco plant that told them how to mix ayahuasca this is not considered a valid or acceptable explanation. And yet… here we are.

Thus spoke the plant is a fantastic book. I cannot recommend it enough. It is one of the most important books that you should read this year. Period.

The script above is the original script I wrote for the episode. It may differ from what ended up in audio due to time constraints.

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