Why We Should Start Naming Heatwaves

So, we survived the heatwave here in the UK and the temperatures that I wrote about last week. Storms rolled through Friday and Saturday, breaking the worst of the temperatures. Laying in bed the other night listening to the rain arrive and feeling the damp cool air roll in though the window, I decided we should name heatwaves the same way as we do storms.

America has a tradition of naming and personifying hurricanes, but here in the UK, the Met Office didn’t start naming storms until 2015. The decision was made due to the confluence of a number of factors. First, it was a reaction to the media and semi-official agencies’ decisions to give previous storms names on an ad-hoc basis, the best example being the “St. Jude” storm in 2013. Secondly it was found that this ad hoc storm naming was confusing the public, and gave the impression that some high-risk storms were more risky than others just due to being named by a tabloid headline.

Downstream of that, it was adopting due to ample evidence that naming and personifying an incoming weather front allows the risks and dangers associated with the event find firmer purchase in the public psyche. Naming storms helps people understand the risks involved much more easily than abstract yellow or amber warnings.

At the time, predictably, the British tabloids were scathing about the idea, complaining about Americanisation, making claims of scaremongering, and rumbling about the British nanny state. Yet, a decade on, the evidence shows that naming storms and the Met Office’s 2015 decision to begin naming storms has been a resounding success. A prominent 2019 study by the University of Reading and the Open University, which analysed the pulic/media communication of Storm Doris, proved that official naming creates a synchronised, rapid spike in public awareness. Crucially, the paper showed that this translated directly to measurable, real-world behavioural changes—such as a significant reduction in rush-hour motorway traffic as people actively chose to stay safe.

The “Lucifer” Fallacy

So, what about naming heatwaves? Firstly, this is not a new idea. A study from the Priestley Centre for Climate Futures at the University of Leeds looked into it and suggested that it was a bad idea, concluding that the idea of a long stretch of sunshine, blue skies, and hot weather didn’t fit well in the public imagination worthy of a named event, and couldn’t picture the risk in the same way as we associate it with storms.

This paper, titled “How concerning is Lucifer? Insights from an experimental study of public responses to heat event naming,” was published in early 2024. Which means it came out after the UK had experienced the major 2022 and 2023 hot spells, but before the unprecedented crisis we just lived through in June 2026.

And, well frankly, the study was a little unimaginative with its naming conventions; the finding that the public wouldn’t take ‘Heatwave Lucifer‘ seriously is not exactly surprising. In a cultural vacuum, slapping a heavily stylised name onto a few sunny days can make the warning feel like artificial media hype, leading some participants to worry about “sensationalism.”

But nevertheless, I do think naming heatwaves is a good idea moving forward. The last week here in the UK, with three consecutive days of unprecedented Met Office Red Extreme Heat Warnings, melted IT infrastructure, closed schools, and tragic drownings, has broken through into the public consciousness. Extreme heat, I don’t think, will be viewed as a rare summer treat but as a systemic national emergency.

How Many Names?

Assuming that we were to begin such a practice in the UK, I wondered over the weekend: if we had started naming heatwaves in the UK at the same time as we began naming storms in 2015, I asked Claude how many of each would we have given a name to?

Since then, the Met Office has issued 73 names for storms (including the current, incomplete 2025/26 season). Looking through the historical weather data, my AI collaborator and I pulled together a heuristic with a mixed threshold of both Met Office weather warnings for extreme heat (which only launched in June 2021 and start at the Amber level) and long periods of yellow heat-health alerts that went on for a long duration.

This gave us a total of four potential named heatwaves that met the criteria for a truly high-impact, disruptive national event. You can see the comparative distribution in the table below:

Naming 73 storms vs 4 heatwaves seems about right to me. In terms of rarity and occurrence right now. It keeps the naming system highly exclusive, ensuring that the public doesn’t suffer from warning fatigue, while guaranteeing we treat a genuine crisis with the gravity it deserves. And the timing is urgent—right now it looks like we have another heatwave on the way in July.

All In The Name

Storms are named after people alternating genders. Storm Alice, Storm Bob, etc. Which was adopted to harmonise with the US agency and its naming of hurricanes.

Naming heat waves this way however, I don’t think would cut it. Heatwave Chaz followed by Heatwaver Dave doesn’t hit the same as does with a storm, and Heatwave lucifer, used in the study is a little on the nose.

Instead I would like to suggest that the Met Office adopt the names of monsters from British folklore, perhaps we can expand the list to add in beasts from Norse and French Romances too. If were were to harmonise the convention across to our European neighbours.

I think stepping away from mundane human names and tapping into deep cultural myths, but crucially not biblical or well known names! We can invoke the correct amount of atmospheric dread. A warning that Heatwave Black Shuck (the ominous, red-eyed hound of doom) or Heatwave Nuckelavee (the malevolent northern demon of drought and withered crops) is rolling in gives the threat a name and a tangible shape.

It commands ancestral and cultural respect, cuts through tabloid cynicism, and tells the public exactly what they need to know: a predatory force is coming, and it’s time to take cover.

Beyond public safety, I also think it puts English/British culture, and our rich mythic history back in the limelight. This is something that is sorely needed right now with the rise of nationalism unmoored from any deep sense of place. Rather than weaponising identity in the abstract, this might anchor our identity back to the land itself, its history, and the ancient stories we once used to explain the terrifying power of the natural world.

On The Blog

Words for a Departed Wizard

I wrote a long, heartfelt, memorial post to/for my departed friend Gordon White. I’m glad to have written it, and put it online. It’s one of the most personal things i’ve ever posted on line, and as a piece of writing, I’m very proud of it.

I was immediately struck by his magnetic personality, his wit, his charm, and above all, his absolutely extraordinary memory. This last quality was both scarily impressive and frequently absolutely infuriating. The confidence that made him such a compelling thinker could harden into a genuinely formidable inability to back down.

The bitch would just never admit that he was wrong.

About.
Anything.
Ever.

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The Ministry Of My Own Labour

• Calls so many calls
• Finished Episode 303! Recording this week, and doing the zine layout!
• Finished the layout for 100 Notes on Story Dwelling
• Wrote that thing about G.

Really unproductive week in the heat.

Terminal Access

Stuart Millard continues to be one of my favourite Youtubers. in this instalment he’s doing VHS archaeology on the show WOW. Something I vaguely remember and thought I’d hallucinated.

Reading

I’m still reading Postal Intelligence: The Tassis Family and Communications Revolution in Early Modern Europe by Rachel Midura. So so interesting!

I also started listening to The Others Within Us: Internal Family Systems, Porous Mind, and Spirit Possession by Robert Falconer. Absolutely fucking brilliant book. Can’t recommend it enough. Late career therapist pointing out the bleeding obvious, and saying it with their whole chest. Love it. Which I could talk to Gordon about it. 🙁

Ibeyi – Offerings (LP)

Wow. Ibeyi are a new discovery for me. This Offerings LP came out a few days ago and its fantastic. Apparently it’s their 4th album, and i’m looking forward to going back though their catalogue/ The first words to come to mind to review the album is ‘devotional art pop’. This album has a really long sonic life, and will sound as fresh in 10 years as it does right now. There is so much going on here, lyrics, orchestration, production.

Can’t recommend it enough. I have a feeling this album is going to show up in a lot of people’s 2026 best of lists.

Remember Kids:

The post Why We Should Start Naming Heatwaves | Weeknotes #445 appeared first on thejaymo.net.

The Future Arrived in June

I’m going with the ol’ British standby, writing about the weather.

Because the UK and most of Europe is currently trapped under a massive heat dome, causing absolutely unprecedented June temperatures. Here in my part of London, the Met Office predicts we will experience two consecutive days of 39°C on Wednesday and Thursday, with a strong potential for the all time UK temperature records to fall elsewhere in the country.

The main cause for concern is that our night temperatures aren’t dropping below 20°C. The Met Office calls these “tropical nights,” which sounds like a holiday until you remember that the vast majority of British houses are built to trap heat inside. Because of the sustained high night time temperatures, neither buildings nor bodies get a chance to cool down. The heat rolls over from one day into the next, meaning that by Thursday, you’re not dealing with that day’s weather, but the compounding heat left over from Tuesday and Wednesday as well. Also, while temperature records are usually broken by fractions of a degree, the June record is on track to be cleared by three or four degrees this week.

I could put a whole rant in here about adaptation, particularly at the home scale, growing climbers on south-facing walls, the wonders of the nearly forgotten technowledge that is the ‘awning‘; but instead my mind has gone to the mechanics of climate models.

Inside Model Land

Having done a lot of climate futures work, and given my assertion that “worlds are the first new medium of the twenty-first century,” I often take the position that it’s best to explain that a climate model simulates a ‘possible world’ where a specific set of assumptions, such as whether global emissions rise or fall, are allowed to play out. These models do not produce a single definitive future. Rather, they map out a relative population of potential futures.

In her book Escape from Model Land: How Mathematical Models Can Lead Us Astray and What We Can Do about It, statistician Erica Thompson explains how mathematical modelling has become one of the defining technologies of modernity. We live in a society governed in “Model Land,” where economic forecasts, pandemic planning, energy grids, and weather reports all depend on simplified representations of reality. The entire point of a model is that it must leave things out, because if it contained every variable in existence, it would simply be the world itself. Therefore, the big question to ask of a model is what it includes, what it excludes, and what decisions are made based on its assumptions.

Climate models are some of the most complex model systems humans have ever built. They divide the atmosphere, oceans, and land into a massive multi-dimensional grids, using our best understanding of physics to calculate what happens inside each section. While they are incredibly sophisticated, models frequently struggle with small-scale events or rare conditions that line up at the extreme edge of probability. The volatile tail of the graph where records are broken.

When meteorologists or the media state that temperatures are “20°C above average”, they are measuring against a baseline reference period that runs from 1991 to 2020. This baseline is calculated by averaging thirty years of June data together to smooth the yearly weather noise into a readable pattern. However, a baseline spanning 1991–2020 is not really an accurate description of our climate today; it describes a historical period whose midpoint was 2005 a world we have already left well behind.

This shifting baseline is also a common source of misunderstanding when talking about climate scenarios/futures in workshops. When people hear that a particular extreme temperature is associated with a future decade like the 2040s or 2080s, they often mistake it for something they should expect on the calendar, like a timetable. They assume the weather will remain roughly normal until we reach those milestones. But climate scenarios alter the odds of an event happening rather than an event being a fixed temporal appointment.

As most of the work in climate futures has been in narrative strategy, and I’ve often found myself explaining the statistics of climate scenarios by analogy. Something like this:

Imagine a bag filled with numbered balls representing potential weather outcomes. In the old British climate, most balls had typical temperatures written on them, while almost none read 35°C or 40°C. Climate change doesn’t suddenly “come along” and hand you a brand-new bingo bag every decade or so. Instead, as the years pass, it swaps out the cooler balls for hotter ones. In any given year you can still accidentally pull out a cold, rainy summer, or draw a future extreme temperature well ahead of schedule.

Climate futures arrive day by day, first as freak weather, then as a run of bad luck, and then eventually as normal. For instance, the technical work underpinning the UK’s Third Climate Change Risk Assessment (CCRA3), published in 2022, examined climate projections for periods including 2021–2040. It concluded that exceeding 40°C before 2040 was possible but very unlikely in its model ensemble. Yet on 19 July 2022, the UK recorded 40.3°C at Coningsby. A rare event with a low annual chance can still come up on the first draw; that doesn’t make the estimate wrong. But it does show why low-probability extremes cannot safely be treated as events belonging only to the distant future. In fact a project I was working on just after the end of the pandemic was all about early thinking to explain why the prediction wasn’t wrong to the public.

To address this limitation, the Met Office and The Royal Meteorological Society recently published a paper using a different approach. Instead of relying solely on the relatively small number of summers contained in the observational record, the researchers used a larger climate-model ensemble to generate many physically plausible summers from past data. The method, known as UNSEEN (UNprecedented Simulated Extremes using ENsembles), allowed atmospheric and surface conditions to combine in ways that have not necessarily occurred but remain possible extrapolating from the present climate and recent past.

Using this much larger collection of simulated outcomes, they estimated that, in the climate of 2023, the UK had roughly a 1-in-24 chance of exceeding 40°C in any given year. Our current scenarios are therefore no longer merely warning that 40°C is possible. They suggest that it is becoming more and more repeatable: not a country touching an extreme temperature once as an isolated incident, but enduring it as a persistent feature of an altered climate.

The trouble with Model Land is that nobody actually lives there. While the UNSEEN ensemble runs thousands of parallel, simulated summers on a supercomputer in Exeter, we are left to sweat through one specific, unyielding iteration of reality. By Wednesday afternoon all the statistics I’ve read over the last 15 years will have faded into the background, and it won’t matter whether a 40°C day is a 1-in-24 fluke or a 1-in-300 anomaly when I’m inside a on bed Victorian terrace conversion whose back wall has spent 48 hours acting like a storage heater.

I’ve spent years narrating scenarios. The job with them (i think) is mostly standing slightly to one side of a possible world and describing it for people. A summer could get this hot. By the 2040s the odds might do this or that. You’re always describing a world you haven’t arrived in. This week though I don’t get to stand there, the world I’m inside isn’t a scenario, it’s just Thursday in June.

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Terminal Access

In the LRB, Jay Owens this week wrote about the introduction of the Nature’s Rights Bill, which seeks to grant nature inherent legal rights as a rights-bearing entity rather than treating it as “natural capital.”

In the UK, though, rights of nature are so far more gesture than law. Crowhurst Parish Council in East Sussex has bestowed ‘personhood status’ on a 1300-year-old yew tree, which encouraged Rother District Council to announce its support for the rights of trees more widely. Also in Sussex, Lewes Council recognised the rights of the River Ouse, including its ‘right to an active and influential voice’ in planning and development, though ‘the council cannot and has not granted the River Ouse legal personality’.

Reading

I finished Breakneck: China’s Quest to Engineer the Future by Dan Wang. Its really good. A fascinating look at China and America as the “Engineering State vs. Lawyerly Society”. Learnt so much.

I’m also reading Postal Intelligence: The Tassis Family and Communications Revolution in Early Modern Europe. I’ve already recommended it to Benedict despite only being 20% of the way though.

Postal Intelligence connects and situates histories of the post and government intelligence alongside print technology and state power in the wider context of the early modern communications revolution. In the sixteenth century, postal services became central to domestic governance and foreign policy enterprises, extended government reach and surveillance, and offered new control over the public sphere.

Stephen Wilson Jr – Preachers Kid (Single)

I told my friend Jess to check out Stephen Wilson Jr the other week, søn of dad was one of my favourite albums of 2024. Though I realised today that I didn’t post about it on the blog at the time! Listen to SWJ. One of the best songwriters today.

Anyways he has a new single out. Its amazing.

Remember Kids:

The post The Future Arrived in June | Weeknotes #444 appeared first on thejaymo.net.

Taste As Interface Behaviour

The Guardian had a great piece over the weekend by pop culture writer Rachel Aroesti called Have I been influenced, or is this actually me? How personal taste fell out of fashion. It’s about taste. Good taste and bad, and the author’s suspicion that due to the state of social media, we might not have any taste at all any more. What we might think of as our personal preference, is in fact just psychic residue left over from having been shown the same thing 100 times a day by a machine. It’s really good! go read it it.

Six years ago in Animal Crossing Is The Place For Taste I was thinking the ‘demonstration’ of taste online. In that game, taste is demonstrated by arranging virtual objects in a toy box world. You perform taste by making a place. Later I argued in Good Taste Online that each platform had its own physics and affordances, and therefore its own way of making taste visible: Twitter has retweets and likes and replies. Pinterest has boards. Tumblr has juxtaposition. Minecraft configurable virtual environments.

But after reading Aroesti’s piece, I would put it more strongly.

Taste is an interface behaviour

Millennials and older might like to romanticise pre-internet media discovery and wax lyrical about the noble struggle of crate-digging, mixtape making, and hanging around in bookshops… I know I do! But none of these nostalgia bait memories are pure encounters with culture. Just like the code-spaces we encounter today, bookshops, libraries, the radio all had interfaces too.

Aroesti writes:

This is no longer the case. We increasingly encounter most aspects of the world through a single aperture: streaming and social media platforms. Or, more specifically, the algorithmic feeds of streaming and social media platforms, plus algorithmically optimised search engines and e-commerce sites, from Amazon to Vinted. In many cases, these are programmed to show each individual specific content based on data gathered from their own activities and those of other users – content that will ideally keep them on the platform for as long as possible.

This is exactly right, though I think “aperture” is too passive. A window is something you look through, the feed is something that watches you doing the looking. It’s an apparatus that observes you observing, then changes its own behaviour based on that observation, which in turn shapes the future view you see though the window.

But, the record shop as taste interface was kinda optimised in the same way too. Genre bins ar ea kind of taxonomy. Staff picks are the recommendation engine. The counter both a record and comic book shop is a social checkpoint, and for better or worse, a site of community moderation. If hardcore punk or UK Jungle was getting popularity with customers, the shop would respond by stocking more of that genre. There is how a big difference between a record shop and the feed.

Latency. A lot of what I think of as taste matures in the delay between exposure and judgement. I belive things need to ‘settle in‘ to culture. The immediacy of the feed collapses the delay. The feed responds to you, instantly, and the world it builds next is shaped by the gesture you just made. The shop has a feedback loop measured in months and pointed at a market. The feed is measured in milliseconds and pointed at a person.

It’s a bewildering paradox: these platforms made personalisation a major part of their business model, then synthesised, commodified and automated individual taste into oblivion. We no longer choose what we want to consume; we take what we’re given. And we are being given it in such overwhelming quantities that we no longer have the mental capacity to properly digest and assess what we have encountered.

I understand the feeling here, but I don’t think that we no longer choose on social media. Your Attention is Sovereign. We are always actively making choices on social media; by pausing, not skipping, replaying, hovering, letting the next episode begin. I understand these can be influenced by dark patterns and UX tricks etc, but you are still responsible for your actions. Social media is less a battle for attention than what I’ve elsewhere called a Conflict of Disinterest: the ongoing, internal work of choosing what to overlook. The choices are still yours. They have just been turned into a continuous stream of tiny, pre-formatted gestures.

Online taste though an interface becomes behaviour, that behaviour becomes data, and that data becomes prediction. Then you fall into The Loop. Code Space is Bayesian prediction all the way down. Inside the feed you are being presented with a ‘culture-world’ shaped by all your previous gestures of choice. The self is still in there somewhere, but it’s increasingly buried under its own captured behaviour.

This is also why I am not sure taste has been destroyed. Flattened, yes. Operationalised? gamed? automated? captured? Yes. But not destroyed. Taste has been translated into interface behaviour.

Emily Segal’s recent viral piece on “tasteslop” is also useful here.

To riff on this: if taste classifies (and classifies the classifier), tasteslop is what happens when the classifying function is automated, overly explicit, or reduced to spitting out rote taste tokens.

Segal is right that tasteslop happens when the classifying function is automated, but I would put the emphasis on individual behaviour. The machine does not really know taste, it knows the gestures that have clustered around taste.

See Marek Poliks’ ’No One Listens to Music Anymore’

I think the internet and social media recommendation algorithms made taste programmable, in the same way it made culture playable. The token is not the taste. Taste is the relation between the object and the person, and the social world in which the judgement is made.

There’s a whole sidequest into the concept of ‘Answerability’ here, but I’m going to leave it to one side as that’s what a chunk of the next episode of Permanently Moved is going to be about.

Anyways, the platform sees media as a collection of ranked ordinal points, vectors in a database, but the person has a relation to the work. This is why so much tasteslop feels dead even when it is made of tasteful parts. It has the references, but not the relationship. If you have a relationship to the media in question, it is answerable, then all good. But to do that you need to explain why:

Segal’s own summary gets very close to this. She writes:

“Taste is not really a property of various objects. It is a socially validated relation between objects, people, histories, scenes, and timing.”

Yes. Exactly. But if taste is a relation, then interfaces matter because the kind of interface shapes the relation. A mixtape and a Spotify playlist can contain the same songs, but they do not ask the same behaviour from either the maker or the listener. John Peel or Mary Anne Hobbs were also interfaces in a way. A mixtape or radio show is a sequence of songs with pacing, and tonal change etc — All the things that make the film High Fidelity romantic. An algorithmic playlist does all of that too, but the platform also makes the gesture searchable, measurable, and reproducible at scale.

Taste is not just what passes through you. It is what culture becomes after passing through you, via a particular interface. This is why Animal Crossing still feels like such a good early example. It gives you a little island and a lot of objects and says: okay then, make a world.

I personally have never thought that having bad taste was the bad thing. John Waters didn’t tell you to have faith in your good taste; he said have faith in your own bad taste. But faith in bad taste is not the absence of discernment, it is a higher form of it.

Which is why I’ll keep hammering on the idea of discernment.

To knowingly like the unfashionable thing, you first have to know it’s unfashionable and why, and step outside that on purpose. That is his whole game. Liking something other people think is bad taste, and being able to say exactly why you like it anyway, is good taste. The judgement is still there, just pointed against the grain. The worse condition is having no taste at all, when your preferences arrive entirely from outside without the practice of discernment. The feed is very good at supplying preferences and very bad at leaving you the latency to act upon them.

Segal lists “Discernment” as the first part of definition of good taste, asking: “Can you tell one thing from another, and can you make a specific, articulated judgment about why one thing is better than another?” I agree with this, but again I would go even harder than Segal does.

If taste is a relation between objects, people, histories, scenes and timing, then discernment is the one part of that relation the feed cannot perform on your behalf. It can supply the cultural objects, but it can’t do the telling-apart for you, no matter how hard it tries. Discernment is not the whole of taste, but in the 2020s it may be the most important part: choosing one thing over another that the feed serves up. Which in many ways we are doing all the time, acticly choosing.

This is the same act I’ve described in the Conflict of Disinterest, but from the other direction. Disinterest is the refusal; deciding what not to spend attention on. Discernment is what that refusal makes possible. Once you have a tighter field of view though the window, you can actually tell one thing from another. I don’t think you can hav the second without the first.

Discernment is the ability to ask and then articulate why you like something, or why you hate something, or whether you have spent enough time with it. Good taste online is the practice of noticing what interface brought the thing and what gesture it is inviting you to perform. The headline “Have I been influenced, or is this actually me?” is actually a very run of the mill millennial crisis of authenticity (which I also think is a silly niche and generational concern). It’s actually I think a crisis of lack of discernment. Being influenced is not the problem online, not being discerning about what is influencing you is the problem. It’s the same with advertising, as the same flattened interfaces that serve you culture, also serve you adverts.

Near the end of Aroesti’s piece, publisher Ione Gamble offers this advice, and it’s very similar to my own.

When it comes to tuning into your own taste, Gamble’s advice is essentially the same. “Always question yourself. Why do I like that? Do I just like it because I’ve been shown it 100 times – or do I genuinely love it?”

But I don’t think you can out-question a system whose whole physics is around the production of rapid questions. You can only take responsibility for where you put your own attention. If taste matures in the delay between exposure and judgement, then discernment needs latency. You have to somehow and somewhere put the delay back; to let a thing sit long enough that your relation to it can form before the interface asks what you think about it again.

And once that delay returns, the discernment can move up a level. The wider battle ground in the Conflict of Disinterest not whether this or that video in the feed is to your taste, but whether the entire act of engaging with the form is. Is short-form vertical video to your taste as a way of encountering culture? Is short-form microblogging? Boomer box television? Radio? Podcasts? Do I like the interface and the medium that keeps placing objects in this relation to me?

If your Attention is Sovereign, then taste is what you do with that sovereignty; and discernment is how you keep it from being spent for you. Otherwise you end up with no taste at all. Only a feed-shaped pattern of exposure and reaction.

Start Select Reset 📑

Subscribing to SSRZ supports my online work and creative projects.

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Terminal Access

This post on late 90’s UK Emo/Hardocre punk scene is super interesting! The Political War That Tore British Emo Apart — Scuff.

At the end of 1990, Anderson and his schoolmates worked up the courage to form their own band. They took the name Understand, and by the next year, had also welcomed Coleman. They spent their early years trading time as openers between hardcore bands and the more mainstream rock of Revolver, Stereolab and Ned’s Atomic Dustbin. For Understand, this separation never existed; Anderson had digested everything from Iron Maiden to Mudhoney to Napalm Death.  Their sound reflected this, honed around the grooving riffs of American post-hardcore groups Quicksand and Fugazi and the melodicism of first-wave British emos Sink and Bad Dress Sense, but also grunge breakouts Nirvana and Soundgarden and the alternative metal rhythms of Helmet and TAD. 

I didn’t get involved in the UK DIY punk scene until 1999 when I was 14, so Understand or Fabric were bands I only ever saw written about in the past tense in Fracture Mag.

Reading

I finished Duncan Barford’s novel The Going Down. It’s one of the best contemporary fiction books I’ve read in ages. As I said last week “Magical dreaming” is very much the operative description. Never read anything like this written by someone in ‘the west’

I moved on to some non-fiction and spent this months audible credit on Breakneck: China’s Quest to Engineer the Future by Dan Wang of ‘Annual Letter’ fame. Really interesting so far. I wish I lived in a highly competent engineering state. lol

horsegiirL – Nature Is Healing (LP)

If you have been wondering where an album of totally bonkers; euro-rave pop bangers and hyper pop pastiche, performed by an anthropomorphic horse DJ has been all your life then look no further!

This album is fantastic both in concept and its execution. Some potential songs of the summer on here!

Remember Kids:

The post Taste As Interface Behaviour | Weeknotes #443 appeared first on thejaymo.net.

The Backrooms as Permissive IP

A lot has been written about the commercial success of Backrooms in the last week: a movie by a 20-year-old director, shot when he was 19, which has become A24’s highest-grossing opening film.

I criticise the cultural platform logic of equating financial success with artistic merit in Slop Machines (It’s nearly finished I promise), but it’s obvious why Backrooms success has become a mirror to Disney’s latest attempt to frack the last of the nostalgium out of the Star Wars franchise.

I think what’s more interesting is Backrooms as a cultural and media phenomenon. Over the last few years, my work on worlds, world-building, and online culture means I have opinions from which to step back and look at it more broadly.

Beginning life on 4chan in 2019 with the pairing of an image and another anonymous comment, The Backrooms formed the basis for a cultural blooming: an emergent, post-commodity story world. A kind of cultural myth-object, completely outside the logic and control of the of legacy 20th Century cultural stack.

It’s the clearest example of the sort of thing I was talking about when I wrote about Permissive IPs back in 2020.

The Backrooms almost immediately blossomed into a vast sprawl of wikis, video games, and communities of people engaging with, and expanding the world.

There is the Backrooms Wikidot, which is probably the closest thing to the “literary” Backrooms, with the community world building out levels, entities, objects, phenomena, and multiple competing canons. There is also the Backrooms Fandom wiki, which has its own flavour of lore. There are Reddit communities posting collecting photos of liminal spaces that feel like the Backrooms; imageboards, YouTube creators, Minecraft maps, Garry’s Mod maps and much more.

Then there are the games. Escape the Backrooms (2022), Inside the Backrooms (2022), Backrooms: Lost Tape (2022), The Backrooms 1998 (2022), Enter the Backrooms (2021), and dozens of smaller horror experiments on Steam and itch.io.

None of these games are “official” in any meaningful sense, at least now as we understand officiality through the logic of late 20th Century franchise media. They are all products of different people picking up the myth-object and turning it around, and producing folk art about it.

The Movie Is Downstream From The Folk Art

This expansion of The Backrooms as a piece of mindshare in the cultural sphere is entirely dependent on another case I’ve written about: world literacy.

Audiences now arrive at a media franchise already knowing how worlds work. Not that world, specially, but worlds in general. Audiences have a new fluency, with expectations and a set of standards they didn’t consciously acquire, and they can’t necessarily articulate if asked. They got them from everywhere else. This is quite new. And if you are running a world, it’s one of the most important things to understand about the room you are walking into.

Audiences now arrive with expectations around the grammar of a world. They understand that a story is often just a window onto a larger implied reality, and they brought knowing how to already “read the world” all of this to The Backrooms.

The important thing is that The Backrooms is a collective idea, a piece of modern folklore which, much like earlier online bloomings of this phenomenon like Slenderman, immediately generates folk art.

The key point is that The Backrooms is a permissive entity within the mindshare of franchise media. An immediately understandable reality. An immediately understandable fiction. A door into a pre-existing, previously uncharted location in our collective cultural vector space.

One of the important learnings is that the world of the Backrooms is a “place”. Or rather, it is the minimum viable location. Yellow wallpaper, carpet, buzzing lights, and the sense that something has gone wrong with the structure of reality. Is all that’s needed for an audience with a high degree of world literacy to begin inferring the rest.

Backrooms (2026)

Kane Parsons, the director of A24’s Backrooms, released the first version of his own particular Backrooms universe on YouTube at the age of 16. It was an enormously successful piece of media made almost entirely in the open source software tool Blender.

If you have ever asked yourself what you would have done during the pandemic if you had been 14 years old, the answer for Parsons was: download Blender and filmmaking tutorials from YouTube directly into your brain. Two years later, this culminated in the following film on his channel Kane Pixels:

If you haven’t seen it, it’s worth watching. You can immediately see from its execution why producers at A24 immediately reached out about developing a feature-length version with him.

Because The Backrooms is a Permissive IP, Parsons did not need to own the whole thing in order to make a world inside it. With The Backrooms (Found Footage) parsons created his own branch of the world of The Backrooms. Developing its lore with: research footage, government or corporate experiments, missing persons, and institutional dread and intrigue, are all part of his particular interpretation of the world.

Even with the movie Pearsons hasn’t created ‘the whole’ of The Backrooms. He has created a Backrooms. A very successful Backrooms. And whilst the movie is now in theatres with institutional backing, it still sits inside a wider field of folk production.

I think what Hollywood is going to take away from the success of the movie is the wrong thing entirely. They will look at The Backrooms and see “IP”, commodity franchise dollar signs, instead of recognising a cultural object whose value emerged from permission, participation, and the absence of a single canonical owner.

Bedroom Tools

In 2021, I was working with Rival on the strategy for a large-scale, multi-use, permanent home in West Berlin for an art x technology foundation. During that period, and ever since, I have been trying to get my Millennial and Gen X peers, especially those standing at the gates of cultural institutions, to understand that this kind of “folk art” is the future.

In fact I remember saying something to the effect of, “right now in their bedroom a 14 year old is using a game engine to create a super important cultural artefact.” and they were!

In addition to world literacy, we also have to talk about ‘digital literacy’ and what it even means in the mid to late 2020’s.

When I went to university in 2003 my welcome pack included a quick start guide on how to use Microsoft’s Office Suite and step by step instructions on how to access my university email. Digital literacy meant a familiarity with a set of common programs: word processing, spreadsheets, PowerPoint, etc.

My university machine was my first ‘personal computer’ not shared with my family. Some of my flatmates arrived at university without a computer at all, and had to use the library’s computer labs to write all their assignments until their next loan came through.

Nevertheless we all arrived with a baseline familiarity with these tools required of us for digital literacy in the early 00’s. In fact, the first six weeks of my first year music and technology module consisted of an extremely boring introduction to DAWs. The course was designed in 2000, for students arriving having never used a DAW in their lives. Whereas I arrived being ‘literate’ in Logic, Cubase, FruityLoops, and trackers, hardware interfaces etc.

In the mid-2020s, there is now an entire generation, exemplified by people like Kane Parsons, at the lower end of Gen Z and the upper cohort of the emerging Generation Alpha, who have a comprehensive grasp not just of word processors and spreadsheets, but of game engines and 3D modelling software.

Perhaps they were never formally taught these tools, but they have ambiently absorbed them through daily life: Blender, Roblox, Fortnite Creator, Minecraft, YouTube tutorials, Discord servers, lore videos, modding communities. They also have a highly developed sense of spatial aesthetics and arrangement, developed by spending time inside virtual worlds.

Yes, my Millennial manager friends will moan in the pub about young people straight out of university arriving into the workplace without a clue about how shared drives, folder structures, and SharePoint work. But there is an entire cohort of people in the workplace who have a deep familiarity with video editing, audio editing, 3D modelling software, game engines, spatial composition, sound design, meme formats, lore videos, and publishing.

There is a much wider argument to be made here, and is my contribution to The Culture Stack, but I think the point is made, and Kane Parsons is basically my go-to high-profile example of this phenomenon.

I won’t romanticise it though, there are plenty of young people who are bad with computers, just as there are plenty of people in general who are bad with computers. Email, and SharePoint will always remain obscure occult systems to many of them. But there is also a generation of people who have grown up inside a much broader media tooling environment. They know what a render is. They know what a editing timeline is. They know what an asset is and what a game engine does. And via fandom they know how lore can be collectively made, uploaded, discussed, and iterated.

This interview with Backrooms millennial cinematographer is really interesting to hear how much he learnt from Parsons about using Blender. The whole film was pre-vis’d in Blender, lots of camera tests and experiments done virtually, the world was then exported to CAD software the the sets were designed and constructed. The source of knowledge however was always the blender file.

The success of The Backrooms film points to an audience who interacted with, contributed to, or thought about the Backrooms in the context of it being a Permissive IP. The success of the commercial media is downstream from the folk art.

Protocal Art

Mat Dryhurst and Holly Herndon are currently out there in the media mines trying to explain Protocol Art to people. In its shortest form based on my understanding: art made by designing the conditions under which culture happens.

Which is exactly what Permissive IPs cohere into as well. They are not just “open franchises”. They are intellectual protocols: cultural objects that establish the conditions under which folk production can occur at scale. Objects people can pick up and use to generate more culture. Like Solarpunk as memetic engine.

The anonymous person who posted that image on 4chan in 2019 almost certainly wasn’t thinking about any of this. Nor was the person who wrote the reply. But together, they set the conditions under which a world could unfold. Hollywood can’t buy or replicate this under the conditions of 100 years of copyright inertia and media commodity thinking.

This doesn’t mean Permissive IPs can’t be designed, managed, or stewarded. They absolutely can. That is the work of world runners. People who understand that the value of the world is not held in a single canonical text, but in the ongoing conditions that allow others to enter, contribute, elaborate, and make more culture.

A world runner does not ask: how do we control this?
They ask: what does this world need in order to keep unfolding?

Experience.Computer– Van Neistat

https://experience.computer/

IN THIS EPISODE

Jay Springett and first-generation digital filmmaker and artist Van Neistat explore the mind’s eye as an editing bay and cinematic “hard cuts” in the imagination. Then they discuss: text and video as physical raw material, setting creative boundaries with AI, and consider the YouTube algorithm as ultimately just a mirror of ourselves.

Also in this episode:

• Typewriters, ribbon ink, and treating text as a physical raw material

• Why traditional cinema is Formula One, but is YouTube professional skateboarding

• Visualising to find lost items in physical space

• The “good enough” threshold and Tom Sachs’ Crusty Seal of Approval

It was a real pleasure to meet and speak with Van! please do give it a listen!

On The Blog

May 2026 | Photo 365

Photo 365 2026. Year 5, Month 5. Photo-a-day for the month of May 2026.

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The Ministry Of My Own Labour

• Lunch with Bobby Fishkin from Crowddoing
• Long call catching up with BV about his Venice Biennale successes.
• I edited next episode of the podcast end to end!
• Had a call with a financial adviser
• Call about Liquid UX
• Spreadsheets and projections for one of the orgs I advise.

Terminal Access

I normally post something thats come out recently that I feel is timeline. But Venkat’s 2025 piece “Welcome to the Cosmopolis” has been doing the rounds again, it’s popped up in several group chats, and finally this week I read it properly.

It’s a really chewy piece and unlocked something for me, that I’ve been thinking about but been unable to articulate. Worth reading if you haven’t come across it already!

The element of design enters a cosmopolis as a functionally narrow but composable unit of behavioral logic, the protocol. The architecture of a cosmopolis is a result of a vast number of protocol-design decisions made around a powerful new core technology.

Protocols exist within the territorial logic of nation states and network logic of metropolises too, of course, but they are constitutive in the case of cosmopolises.

In other news RIP John Blanche

Reading

I picked up Duncan Barford of Occult experiments in the home/Baptists Head fame’s first novel The Going Down.

When longtime friends Bailey and Steve perform a final ritual in a house they once shared, the dead and the underworld haunt their lives and challenge their friendship. And when Steve’s girlfriend is drawn in, a dark secret binding Bailey finally comes to light.

Expertly written, The Going Down is not just a work of beautiful fiction but also a transformative work of magical dreaming.

“Magical dreaming” is very much the operative description. Fantastic book. I’m enjoying it so so much. Never read anything like it.

JYOCHO’s – Singles 26 (EP)

Aside from listening the shit out of last years Headache album *again*. This week I spent a lot of time with Japanese math rock masters JYOCHO‘s new EP collecting the last year or so of singles.

My favourite single on the EP is Strong Body.

Remember Kids:

The post The Backrooms as Permissive IP | Weeknotes #442 appeared first on thejaymo.net.

Daily Averages

It’s Tuesday afternoon I’ve been into Central London and back. I got half drowned in a storm, it was glorious sunshine, and now it’s apocalyptic rain and thunder again? Always.

Back in 2020 I wrote about how I use my RSS reader. And that is, still. The main way i consume the Internet. But I mostly now use it on my phone, in conjunction with raindrop.io. Ive almost entirely replaced social media consumption with article reading and … talking to the AI that lives in my bookmarks lol.

Anyways, I direct you to that 2020 post, as in it I shared some of the daily average stats from my ‘webtime tracker’ extension that I had installed into my web browsers during the early lock down to try and get a grip on my attention with some hard metrics and data.

I wish I had a screenshot of the whole top 10 but I did share some snippets of the metrics in that old post.

I was spending nearly 26 min on twitter a day in the deep of the pandemic.

I’ve still have the app installed, and 6 years later here’s my total daily averages over the last 6 years.

*interesting*

I note that this tracker data is from the extension installed on my personal chrome profile rather than the one I use for work. So this is representative of where I spend my “free time” when i’m looking at my browser for fun, and not for money.

Anyways. On a whim, I just downloaded the full data set from the extension as JSON and had my pal Claude rustle me up a ‘bar race’ animation in about 3 mins. So here’s the last 6 years of daily averages / websites that I spend time on ‘for fun’ month by month.

I can see in the animation when iIstoped using google docs for my diary and moved to Day One, and then see a further reduction when I moved all my writing offline to Obsidian + iA writer and more recently, my own vibe coded word processor.

The other observation is that over the last few years I’ve consumed way too much Youtube!!?? I blame people like Noah Caldwell-Gervais, and Fimdeg’s 7.5 hour long oral history of the making of Morrowind lol. I love just sticking on a long form things and doing other things around the house, but the clock still clicks on.

On The Blog

AI-Generated Interfaces and the Delamination of Application UI

As AI separates the UI from the application layer, liquid interfaces point towards the next era of software design.

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Photo 365

The Ministry Of My Own Labour

• Edited and exported a new episode of Experience.Computer. Out Tuesday
• Sorted out some financial stuff
• Removed nearly 6k words from the next episode of permanently moved draft script lol
• Two calls.
• Got sent a draft of a piece by a friend. I slung it on my kindle
• Lots of reading to do.

Terminal Access

Sarah Friend posted a great piece today on “What Kind of Clock is an LLM? — All computational systems contain a model of time and all of them are wrong.”

It’s so good you should deffo read it.

Once a day maybe, the laptop calls out to an NTP (Network Time Protocol) server to reorient. In between calls, it can drift. On a more machinic scale, it makes no guarantees about task processing. If that laptop were to be for example, controlling a CNC bit spinning at 3000 RPM cutting through a piece of sheet metal, or stabilizing a drone while accepting the navigational commands of a distant pilot, it would stutter. If a rogue process, maybe a defrag or cleanup task took over the CPU, the bit would slow imperceptibly, and the cut would be too short. Somewhere, a drone falls out of the sky.

Reading

I finished Hive by Dan Abnett. Like i said last week, I feel like he had a story to tell and was exhausted by the work he’s done in the wider setting and needed a change. Also there’s a part of me that feels like it was written with a bunch of side eye towards Adrian Tchaikovsky now also playing in the 40k universe.

I also *finally* finished Impromptu Man: J.L. Moreno and the Origins of Psychodrama, Encounter Culture, and the Social Network. A really fantastic biography of one of the most important psychotherapists of the 20th C who has, largely, been written out of history. Basically everyone you know was influenced by him.

EXUM – In Russia. A is 9 (LP)

I’ve been really into this super delicate album this week. It’s an eclectic experimental mix of strings, noise, sound art, melodic vocals. All sorts of things really. To just list all those things however doesn’t really do it justice. Looking at the reviews, its quote polarising but I think Its just wonderful.

Remember Kids:

The post Daily Averages | Weeknotes #441 appeared first on thejaymo.net.

Telephone

I found out this week that the information passing parlour game “Chinese Whispers” as it was called when I was growing up (“Telephone” in the USA) isn’t some super old English name for it. It’s a relatively recent term first used in print in 1964! Drawing on racist stereotypes about how Chinese people must all be communists and whispering secrets and speaking in a way that was deliberately confusing to Westerners.

Before that, Victorians called it “Russian Scandal” (1861) and “Russian Gossip” (1880s). An even older 16th-century Italian precursor was the “game of the ear.” Ironically, in China, the game is just called chuánhuà (传话) “passing words.”

Whilst game of the ear is the oldest written name/evidence we have for the existence of the game, it seems to me that the phenomenon of oral transmission mutating from person to person must be tens’s if not hundreds of thousands of years old? Sitting around a campfire and passing a narrative around the group from ear to ear is something we could and would have done for the history of humanity. ‘Gossip’ is a much better metaphor and name than telephone or whispers.

Later on in my wikipedia binge I found this cool PDF from 1945 from the New York Academy of Sciences (NYAS) a lecture by Gordon W. Allport and Leo J. Postman on The basic psychology of rumour. They say that rumours arise when highly important events are shrouded in ambiguity, a combination that thrives during periods of high societal censorship an shock events like Pearl Harbor.

They classify rumours into three broad categories: “fear,” “hostility,” and “wish”. Each providing a dual psychological function: explaining away personal anxiety and providing people an emotional outlet to vent anger at convenient scapegoats, like minority groups or the government. To understand how rumors distort reality, the authors conducted experiments showing that stories undergo a three-part “embedding process” as they spread: leveling, sharpening, and assimilation. 

• Levelling strips the story of most details to make it concise and easy to remember.
• Sharpening selectively exaggerates a few specific, often emotionally charged details that stand out.
• Assimilation reshapes the remaining facts to fit the listener’s pre-existing cultural stereotypes, prejudices, and expectations.

in the end, the objective truth is completely replaced by a subjective narrative that reflects the group’s collective anxieties and biases, meaning that by the time a rumour has traveled through a chain of people, it is no longer a valid guide for belief or action.

I’ve been thinking a lot about this with regard to the neo-oral, or post-truth condition. The authors of the paper never envision the world we are in today. When fact checking, and verifiable sources of information are themselves subject to the same distrust and ambiguity pressures that cause the rise in rumour/conspiracy etc in the first place. If you can’t rely on external “secure standards” as they call them, instead you have to lean on internal and social safeguards that the authors didn’t fully anticipate or explore but are logically implied in the text. Rumours (conspiracy) are, to use Postman and Allport’s words a “barometer of social strain.”

If you work in media today, you need to understand this: if a meme or rumor goes wildly viral, the rumor itself is the truth about the underlying fear, even if the facts are totally wrong. You cannot fight an emotional rumour with a spreadsheet of facts. You have to address the anxiety behind it. Which is the exact opposite of the institutional fact checking industry like BBC verify are trying to do. Because “Feelings don’t care about facts”.

But institutions face massive pressure to manufacture optimism. If millions of people feel like their country is sliding backward, and an outlet like the BBC refuses to validate that reality, the broadcaster becomes part of the “ambiguity” fueling the conspiracy in the first place. Admitting that we are in deep trouble is dismissed as unpatriotic or “doomerism.”

But we don’t need manufactured hope; we need a return to emotional truth. Which is something I’ve been thinking a lot about recently with solarpunk. Luckily, emotional truth, rather than fact is exact the sort of thing thing the Arts and Humanities do best.

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Terminal Access

This is pretty cool. The entire catchment of the River Wye has become the first in the UK to be formally granted legal rights as a living ecosystem through a new charter.

While much of the Wye, or Gwy in Welsh, is protected as a special area of conservation, and the rights in the charter are already recognised across existing legislation and regulatory frameworks, the river has suffered near ecological collapse over the past decade.

Campaigners say excess nutrients from the rapid expansion of industrial chicken farming in the river’s catchment area – aggravated by sewage spills – have caused algae, fungus and weed growth that has suffocated the ecosystem.

Reading

I finished reading Super Nintendo: How One Japanese Company Helped the World Have Fun by Keza MacDonald. It’s a really engaging history, and is told really well with a blend of personal anecdote/history and original interviews/reporting. A whole career’s worth of interivews make the history feel lived though. Highly recommend it!

I started reading Hive by Dan Abnett. It’s an absolutely mammoth two part Warhammer 40k novel. Super cool setting. Feels like he has a story to tell and was exhausted by the wider setting and needed a change in setting.

Castle Rat – The Bestiary (LP)

Now.. I’m a sucker for doom, stoner rock, and psychedelic metal band. Especially if they dress in 70s hammer horror esq costumes and the whole thing is a concept album telling the story of mystical creatures preserved by “The Wizard”.

Commenting on the album, The Rat Queen states: “‘The Bestiary’ is a conceptual book of beasts… containing a collection of mystical creatures from a world forgotten. The last remaining souls of each have been gathered and preserved by ‘The Wizard.’ Cautionary tales of each beast and The Wizard himself are woven through the power of traditional heavy metal song and spell.”

This band RIPS!!

Remember Kids:

The post Telephone | Weeknotes #440 appeared first on thejaymo.net.

Just Sad

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

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

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

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

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Photo 365

Reading

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

Parlour Greens – Emeralds (LP)

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

Remember Kids:

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

Jubensha Con

On Saturday I went to Jubensha Con 2026. The first english language convention about the Chinese social phenomenon of Jubensha.

We’re the world’s first convention dedicated to English-language jubensha. Jubensha is a phenomenally popular “scripted murder” format of games originating in China, where participants roleplay as detectives and/or suspects in mystery to deduce who the culprit is. In recent years it’s broadened far beyond murders into investigations of all kinds, and is spreading internationally.

We’re organising this convention to give people a chance to try out games, spur new collaborations, and help grow the scene. It’s a deliberately lo-fi, informal, and non-profit endeavour, and we want to keep costs as low as possible so money isn’t a barrier to entry.

Huge shout out to Adrian Hon and all the other organisers of the event. I had an amazing time there.

If you are unfamiliar with it as a form, this 2024 People Make Games documentary about it is a good place to start.

I haven’t written up my notes properly from Saturday’s talk track yet, but the following brain dump represents most of the big takeaways, and will forms the basis for them.

• China has/had no extant consumer market for LARP/TTRPGs/Murder Mystery/Escape Room/dinner theatre/or Euro style boardgames. No do young people have a huge ‘Party’ culture. As in having a party. So when Jubensha came along and combining elements from all those things around a social deduction mechanic it exploded in popularity and immidiatly fused with the dating market.
• Jubensha is treated more like a social commodity which is why there was such a boom/bust explosion in Jubensha. Its more like going to Karaoke than something involving a trained and talented performer as the DM. Because of this profit margins are tight, and quality of massively variable. Necessitating the creation of and App called Qiandao to keep track of and rate games and parlours providing them.
• Despite the boom and bust cycle post pandemic the industry is still worth $2billion.
• Yulin Tian and Yihan(Clytze) Li talk on Scripted Intimacy: Designing Emotional Experience in Chinese Jubensha Games was very interesting. A great deal of the current trends in the games have moved away from murder mystery and towards deeper emotional play. Instead of all 6 couples/players being equal in the game. In Script games, there is a clear Main Character and supporting cast. Some MC players will pay their friends to sit though 6-8 (even 13 hour long games) so they can experience them.
  • I think it’s interesting that the new form of script games treat Jubensha as a social technology. Mechanisms like: archetypal casting, asymmetric character scripts, scripted physical moments like weddings and symbolic gift-giving, are essentially techniques from therapeutic and theatrical traditions, packaged into a consumer product. VERY Interesting design space.
• Eastern Jubensha has points systems and defined winners; Western adaptations are moving away from overt win conditions towards pure storytelling. Which seems to reflect a deeper philosophical split about what games are for. The Western instinct is that competition undermines roleplay but in China, the instinct seems to be that stakes require scorekeeping. Neither is obviously wrong, and the tension between them is a productive design question.
• All Jubensha games require a lot of reading, upfront and during play. But Chinese players read Jubensha scripts faster because Chinese is a logographic language, meaning more information is compressed per character. Western designers face a genuine cognitive-load problem that their Chinese counterparts simply don’t. The proclivity toward reading and comprehension etc shapes how dense and long english scripts can realistically be.
• There was an observation that game authors/designers in China have no creative community per say, and games are judged solely by market profitability, and this is was put as an example of when a creative medium scales too fast without building the infrastructure that sustains quality.
• Eastern jubensha is frequently designed for exactly 3 male and 3 female players, with storylines to match, often with a romantic or dating dimension built in. This is a design norm, but for a Western audience steeped in inclusive design, this is genuinely startling.
• In the UK due to the lack of parlours and places to play fully costumed Jubensha, boxed games without a DM seem to be the emerging form factor and design space for play.
• In the West the DM in TTRPGs are co-players in the game. With a level of social respect that Jubensha DM’s working in parlours / treated like Karaoke spots don’t get.
• Lastly, many of the game authors and designers in China come out of the online fandom/fan fiction world. So many of the new emotional script games, their logics and archetypes can be esiely classified by existing online fandom community nomenclature.

Super cool day out!

On The Blog

April 2026 | Photo 365

Photo 365 2026. Year 5, Month 4. Photo-a-day for the month of April 2026.

SSRZ15: Monsters in the Mirror

This zine contains the full essay transcript alongside an introduction and afterword written exclusively for print, material that doesn’t exist in the audio. 36 pages. A5.

Buy on Etsy

Properly printed on heavy stock with thick covers. Hand stamped twice, copy number and FOG logo. This is remaining stock after the print run for my paid subscribers. Once they’re gone, they’re are gone. £18 + shipping worldwide

CAVEAT EMPTOR: International zines are posted with full customs declarations as printed booklets. Depending on your country, local VAT, customs, or handling fees may be due on arrival.

Photo 365

The Ministry Of My Own Labour

• Call with the WineDark crew
• Finished end to end draft of INTERNET OPERATOR episode 303
• Wrote a first draft of ‘ON THE CONSTITUTION OF THE MACHINE MIND’
• Started editing SLOP MACHINES
• Worked on a job application
• Did some work spreadsheeting for a company I advise
• Did a days work over the week working on a set of MCP/REST api prompts for a SME.

Terminal Access

Andrew Dana Hudson’s debut novel Absence is now out!

I was lucky enough to read this in several drafts including the opening, when he thought it was going to be a novella 😂. Its a great story, really gripping and has a lot of philosophical reflection throughout . If you like authors like Kazuo Ishiguro then I think you’ll enjoy Absence! ADH has put the opening chapter up online if you want to whet your whistle.

You can get this book wherever books or ebooks are sold! Find it on Amazon, B&N, Bookshop.org, or ask your local bookstore to order you a copy.

There’s also an audiobook edition (Audible, Apple Books, Kobo), and — based on my own listening as well as the reviews flooding in at Goodreads — the narrator Dan John Miller does a great job.

Reading

I started listening, to AND FINISHED, all 30 hours of Strength of the Few . The second book in the mammoth Hierarchy trilogy by James Islington. It picks up directly from book #1 with no handholding. I can see why people are saying this set of books is fast becoming this decades most important fantasy series. What a book series. Amazing.

Moved on and now I’m listening to that Nintendo book thats in the hardback non-fiction charts at the front of Waterstones. Super Nintendo: How One Japanese Company Helped the World Have Fun by Keza MacDonald.

Chiminyo – NRG 5 (LP)

Chiminyo’s 2025 NRG4 album recorded live at Ronnie Scotts was a highlight of the year last year. Not just as an album, but as a beacon of whats going on in UK music right now. NRG 5 is no different. Recorded live at Peckham Levels, it captures the kind of cultural energy that’s instantly familier to anyone that’s recently spent time amidst London’s concrete spaces.

I mean honestly. What could be more London that this in 2026?

Remember Kids:

The post Jubensha Con | Weeknotes #438 appeared first on thejaymo.net.

Turnstones

I can’t belive its MAY. It feels like only yesterday that I got back from Sri Lanka. With every passing year, it feels like life is accelerating, but then again, so are events.

It’s Bank Holiday weekend here in the UK, so projects are on hold. The GF went to Scotland on Friday to see some friends for two nights, and rather than be on my Jack I went back down to The Chalk. I was only at home a couple of weeks ago for Easter, but in between then and now, my parents have been to Hong Kong and Taiwan and back to see my younger brother. So we had a lot to catch up on.

When I got back on Friday mum asked me what I wanted to do whilst I was home, and the two things I wanted to do were; sit on the beach in the sunshine and, go for a walk along a specific part of the coast. So we did both!

Very nice! Also saw some Ruddy Turnstone’s along the sea wall as the tide was coming in:

Today being bank holiday Monday, I’ve done a bunch of domestic things around the house. Once i’ve posted this I’m going to read my book with a cup of tea.

SSRZ15: Monsters in the Mirror

This zine contains the full essay transcript alongside an introduction and afterword written exclusively for print, material that doesn’t exist in the audio. 36 pages. A5.

Buy on Etsy

Properly printed on heavy stock with thick covers. Hand stamped twice, copy number and FOG logo. This is remaining stock after the print run for my paid subscribers. Once they’re gone, they’re are gone. £18 + shipping worldwide

CAVEAT EMPTOR: International zines are posted with full customs declarations as printed booklets. Depending on your country, local VAT, customs, or handling fees may be due on arrival.

Photo 365

The Ministry Of My Own Labour

• Drafted the spine / argument of the whole of Episode 303 of permanently moved. Just need to write it now.
• Had a long workshop/call about the idea of ‘industrial coordination arbitrage’. Meaning there’s a competitive advantage to re-engineering or figuring a potential customer (or competitor’s) AI model provider and the system prompts of the business. “I know I can sell to you better if I know your infra’s thinking patterns” Inspired by this article on how LLMs prefer to sniff their own farts

Terminal Access

Woke up this morning to a pingback from Tracy Durnell’s Mind Garden on this fantastically hypertext dense post: Aura through the Cult of Self: opportunity creates authenticity. It’s very much worth your time, i came away with a lot of thoughts and seeds of ideas.

In our modern, individualist culture, self-expression has become “not just a moral requirement, but a teleological one,” writes Tara Isabella Burton. “It is what we, as human beings, are for.” Rather than inheriting our identity from our roles in society as we did in the past, today we are each responsible for constructing our own identity. And so, writes Byung-Chul Han, “the production of self becomes a permanent activity.”

Importantly, we must construct our identity both for ourselves and for others. In On Photography, Susan Sontag explains that our culture believes that “images possess the qualities of real things,” but viewers apply this logic in reverse and “attribute to real things the qualities of an image.” Because of this interpretive transference, we can use images to create our selves online, irrespective of physical reality or ownership.

Reading

I’m reading Henryk Jurkowski’s Aspects of Puppet Theatre right now. This book is a ‘classic’ and is on most theatre and puppety syllabi. and i can see why. It’s so interesting! and is one of those books that has totally exploded my thinking into all different directions. No wonder it’s so influential

Still reading The Mirror of Simple Souls by Marguerite Porete. Alan Chapman told me to read it after a conversation last year, and now I’m beginning to understand why.

On the recommendation of a few friends, I’ve started Listening to Will Of The Many by James Islington. I’m about half way though… its not the book i was expecting… it’s very good, it’s just… had I read the blurb, I wouldn’t have read it.

Denonbu – Ultrarhythm (Single)

I have just discovered Japanese producers Denobu, who have a whole J/Hyper-pop transmedia thing going on. An anime world full of story and key characters combined with a the music side which involves dropping a new single every week on a Thursday. They have an enormous back catalogue and i’ve only scratched the surface so far, but this track is a banger.

Remember Kids:

The post Turnstones | Weeknotes #437 appeared first on thejaymo.net.

Nearly Doable

As you might have seen, Issue #15 of my zine went out to subscribers last week. I can honestly report that sending physical things to people is bloody brilliant. Big thanks to everyone who’s been in touch about it.

When I first started making the zine back during the pandemic, I had some hope that this might be the direction of travel. Making and self-publishing proper physical artefacts that are connected to online work and creative projects, then sending them to people in the post.

After a long slog with the initial years of the zine, and making the podcast weeky, I can feel that ambition starting to become real. The whole enterprise hasn’t been “easy”, it is now almost doable. I can see the shape of the new format and how it plays out

I have been thinking a lot about pace and form since finishing 301 last year. I just don’t think people should need to post their creative work online every week for forever. Longer, more considered things, especially when they have a physical component, seem to be a much better shape. Combined the audio episode and the zine are asking for a different kind of attention. They suit the culture I want to live inside of, so I’m doing my bit to help make it happen for others.

Anyway. If sixteen-year-old me, or nine-year-old me for that matter, knew that at the age of forty I’d have a zine shipping around the world, with a proper print run and subscribers waiting for it to arrive in the post, he would be over the moon.

Anyways, there are still a few remaining copies of Issue #15 available on my Etsy.

Buy SSRZ15: Monsters in the Mirror on Etsy

This zine contains the full essay transcript alongside an introduction and afterword written exclusively for print, material that doesn’t exist in the audio. 36 pages. A5. Properly printed on heavy stock with thick covers. Hand stamped twice, copy number and FOG logo.

This is remaining stock after the print run for my paid subscribers. Once they’re gone, they’re are gone.

£18 + shipping worldwide

Buy on Etsy

CAVEAT EMPTOR: International zines are posted with full customs declarations as printed booklets. Depending on your country, local VAT, customs, or handling fees may be due on arrival.

On The Blog

Raindrop.io Stella Prompts for Batch Processing Bookmarks

After a lot of trial and error with batch processing, I realised the best approach was to call Raindrop’s MCP tool names directly using the public API documentation.

So below I’m sharing two versions of the prompt I ended up with. This prompt uses my own Raindrop setup, including collection names like thejaymo, my preferred bookmark note style, and the rules I use for deciding what goes into my public links feed. You’ll need to swap in your own collection names, tag, and review criteria before using it yourself.

Start Select Reset 📑

Subscribing to SSRZ supports my online work and creative projects.

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

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Photo 365

The Ministry Of My Own Labour

• No work this week 😩 but I pushed a whole bunch of personal work and projects forward.
• Zine stuff obviously
• Sent invitation to new Experience.Computer guest. Positive reply. Currently organising recording date.
• Sorting out last of my life admin. Tax return soon though.

Terminal Access

WEDDING PLANIC!

My friend Stef just put her first solo dev indiegame up for wishlisting on Steam!

A roguelike, deck builder about managing a wild wedding party!

Nobody wants to throw a boring party. In Wedding Planic! you arrange a deck of neurotic wedding guests to generate high levels of Craic (which is basically Irish for fun) and Drama. 

Guests will flee, fight and f…lirt their way around the seating plan and it is your job to create good table combos and high scoring synergies to make sure that the party survives the night and goes down in history.

Each guest has a stack of repressed personality traits that can unlock new abilities as the Craic and Drama levels rise, making every playthrough unique and wonderfully chaotic!

Win by combining guests, top table cards and wedding favours to create synergetic combos that make the wedding pop off.

For fans of wedding planning and Balatro!? I played the current build last week, and it’s really coming along. Love to buy wedding favours to juice the craic at the tables! Also, I named this game over Discord DMs one afternoon last year, when we were still working together. My dadcore pun game is so strong. hahaha.

Also, I am available to name your game any time!

Reading

I finished the audio version of Liturgies of the Wild: Myths That Make Us by Martin Shaw. Absolutely fantatic. The man is a national treasure.

I went back to The Mirror of Simple Souls by Marguerite Porete 30% of the book is the introduction and now i’m actually into the main text I’m ripping though it!

Bassekou Kouyate – Miri (LP)

Just this week i discovred the work of Malian musican Bassekou Kouyate a Ngoni calabash player. Man this whole album has groove. I’m so into it. Can’t stop listening though his back catalogue.

Remember Kids:

The post Nearly Doable | Weeknotes #436 appeared first on thejaymo.net.

Novel Cognition

One of the group chats I am in spent most of last week talking about AI psychosis, the claims around cognitive offloading, and cognition more broadly. What follows is me cherry-picking the threads I found most interesting and trying to make sense of what I took away.

Chatting with an AI does not feel particularly new. As I’ve written before, the interface grammar is inherited wholesale from chat rooms and interactive fiction turntaking. What is novel is that what we perceive to be a conversation is detached from another person and turned into a private thinking space. Chat apps, MSN, WhatsApp, Signal or whatever are all conversations with another person, through a machine. Speaking to an LLM is a conversation with a machine, through an existing form.

Switching gears a little, 160 years passed between the invention of the printing press, and the emergence of the form we now call the Novel. The printing press first made books cheaper and more common. And then over time it made possible new kinds of reading practices: silent reading, private reading, long-form prose, and interior narration.

All these things eventually came together and created the form of the novel. Which we must remember is not a genre or kind of book, but something that created a new (and therefore very recent in the grand scheme of things) cognitive arrangement.

The novel normalised private interiority. It gave readers a way to sit alone and spend time inside another consciousness. It trained a relation to selfhood that now feels so obvious and natural we can barely register it as new or rather novel at all.

I keep wondering whether AI is doing something similar for computation. It’s been 70 years since the invention of the transistor, the Information Age continues to unfold, and where we are at is “thinking with a machine” I quickly becoming ordinary.

Venkat Rao’s blog post this week on “writing liveness” is super useful. If the novel was print becoming a technology capable of influencing our inner life, AI is a kind of writing that is sufficiently alive. Responsive and capable of reshaping itself around the reader in real time. Generated text behaves like an interlocutor, an uncanny monster talking to you from the other side of the screen. The text it produces has enough ‘liveness’ that all the old categories of what text is or does are made redundant.

This is why I think AI needs a wider frame than the simple claim that people are becoming lazy. The worries people have around cognitive offloading seem to mostly be around the value of intellectual labour. We can argue all day long about which kinds of thinking it weakens and which it supports. Instead I think using an LLM is a new variable in cognition entirely.

Looking backwards, the emergence of “Novel Cognition” was met with its own panic. Critics worried that fiction softened the mind, weakened the nerves, blurred the line between reality and fantasy, encouraged “excessive sensibility”, and made readers unfit for ordinary life. Reading was sometimes described in almost medical terms: as dangerous overstimulation or a kind of mania.

Which all sounds very much like the anxiety about what pop culture is calling “AI psychosis¹.” A new medium arrives. It becomes private, immersive, emotionally charged, and difficult to regulate from the outside. Critics worry that speaking to LLMs also destabilises a persons reality, encourages projection, rewards fantasy, amplifies the wrong kinds of feeling. Some of it is most definitely the reflex a culture has when a new cognitive technology arrives (see also: photography, radio, television, film, social media), but it is also the response to something genuinely new.

The simple difference being: A novel is static and an LLM is interactive.

LLM-generated text functions as a new malleable surface of private cognition. It identifies an affective state and reflects it back in a loop. So whatever is present in the context window gets mirrored and intensified. Paranoia, grief, grandiosity, loneliness, or whatever.

All of which is why the available language still feels inadequate. We do not yet have any proper terms for the kind of cognition that emerges when a person thinks in private with responsive text. The first readers of Don Quixote did not have a stable theory of interiority ready to hand either. They had only the sensation that something had become possible in prose that had not been possible before.

This to me is how this moment feels too, and we are still very early. The chatbot may only be the pamphlet stage of whatever this medium eventually becomes. But after 70 years computation is beginning to reveal a new native cultural form. Some still-unnamed form of private co-thinking.

If that is right, we are in a strange historical position, in addition to being the generation that experienced the first globally networked information environment, we are also the first to encounter a new posture of mind that the internet made possible.

I’ve written about why Don Quixote is so great before. And I will only half jokingly look you in the eye and tell you that not only is it the first novel, it’s also the only novel worth reading. So it’s obviously a book that I’m going to keep reaching for. It is after all, among other things, a novel about what happens when a person is unmade by media-induced madness. Completely overtaken by his reading, he mistakes reality for the metaverse because a medium has colonised his sense of reality. In todays vernacular Quixote is suffering from “Book Psychosis”.

Right now I think we are all probably in the same position as the the first readers of Don Quixote were, early enough to sense that something important has arrived, and early enough to encounter its pathologies before we understand its form.

1. I don’t wish to minimise the very real effects of what is happening to people, and what they and there loved ones are experiencing. But what we are calling AI psychosis might just be ordinary psychosis with a new causal amplifier. ↩︎

On The Blog

We’ve Been Here Before

We are a couple of years into AI being in the workplace and I’m starting to see a gap opening. Some teams have developed a real fluency and are doing things that previously only companies ten times their size could do.

Others meanwhile, are still stuck arguing about whether AI can write a decent email?

This post has had quite an enthusiastic response from a number of angles and people. Been interesting to see how it’s landing in different parts of my network. Also, it got a much coveted webcurious feature this week! Thanks Matt!

This, by Jay Springett, is one of the smartest things I have read about workplace AI use and adoption, and how one might helpfully think of the tech and what it can do and how to use it in the aftermath of its recent step-change in performance and the fact you can now just…build stuff. In particular, it’s another useful reminder of something I have been banging on about for several years now – to whit, that the best way to think of these things is as machines with which you can fcuk with information in ALL SORTS OF WAYS, and that the real value comes in thinking not ‘what can the AI do?’ but ‘how might I usefully fcuk with this information to achieve goal X? And how, then, might I use AI to help me do that?’, but it also does a reasonable job of pointing out what a potential nightmare this is going to be in terms of the unchecked proliferation of LLM-generated informational artefacts: “Once ordinary workers can generate disposable software-shaped artefacts in minutes, they will also generate disposable security problems in the same amount of time. A new feral layer in the organisation with new problems involving access, data leakage, and governance. Nobody designs feral databases into existence, but things get made and stick in the gaps of an organisations sanctioned systems. LLM artefacts will do the same and will be even harder to audit than a nested IF formula. The open question for me is what kinds of unofficial artefacts an organisation is prepared to live with, before it has to unpick the mess after something has gone wrong. This sort of thing happens all the time with other software, which is why SaaS and enterprise systems exist in the first place.”

Start Select Reset 📑

Subscribing to SSRZ supports my online work and creative projects.

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Photo 365

The Ministry Of My Own Labour

• Call with a very early stage team building software stack and robots for verification and quality control in the construction industry.
• On the final edit pass of SLOP MACHINES
• Went to LGF and Weird Worlds. Played the latest build of Stef’s mid century modern and Belatro inspired wedding game Wedding Planic. Will blog terminal access it as soon as it’s up for wish listing on steam.
• Went to Band practice
• Sat in on a long zoom workshop

Terminal Access

Nice piece on the conflict of disinterest in the walrus recently The War Against Misinformation Is Over. The Lies Won. Well worth a read.

There is a clear off-ramp to our informational hell: Consume less information.

The wonders of the morning newspaper and the evening newscast were that they asked only an hour of your time. You had no obligation to check the newspaper every five minutes to consult what has changed. There was no moral imperative to stay glued to your screen to hardwire into new developments.

Reading

I’m nearly finished with Our Thoughts Determine Our Lives: The Life and Teachings of Elder Thaddeus of Vitovnica. The back half of the book is broken down into ‘teachings’ on things like prayer, family life, grace etc and within each section are paragraphs of discrete ideas that build on one another. Lovely stuff.

Sunn O))) – Sunn O))) (LP)

Hot damn. New Sunn O))) record. On SubPop too which is cool.

It’s a very different beast to 2019’s Life Metal, this S/T album is very back to basics (only with better production) and because of that, is one of their best albums in years. Man. Per-ordering 00 VOID because I read about it in metal hammer in 2000 and listening to it all summer holiday feels … a long time ago. 👴

Remember Kids:

The post Novel Cognition | Weeknotes #435 appeared first on thejaymo.net.

Everyone Vibe Codes Their Own Markdown Editor Eventually

Weeknotes delayed to a Monday morning yet again. This time around its because yesterday evening I was faced with a choice. Write my weeknotes, or continue to vibe-code my dream word processor app. I chose the vibe coding to make the most of my weekly session tokens.

There is a joke in my group chats is that everyone using coding tools will, eventually, vibe code their own custom Markdown editor. And I’m not exception. Whilst i am a diehard iA writer user there are things I wish it did, and had features that were more geared towards editing rather than pure lightweight text generation. Like.. in the Mac Version the tool doesn’t show a document outline at all?

I’m still working on getting basic things sorted like … you know safely saving and opening files and storing unsaved changes (you know, the basic things that the initial build of the app just blew right passed LOL).

BUT getting a head of myself, the first feature I added to celebrate the successful implementation of submenu logic in the sidebars was this information bar showing a graph and wordcounts in the document outline. Why don’t wordc ount screens do something like this out the box? I’ve always wanted a tool like this, and now I have one.

Lots more still to do. I want to implement binder like menu inspired by scrivener in the left hand toolbar that decomposes a single markdown document into cards using — line breaks as sections.

I also want a very comprehensive diff tool to compare changes between two documents, or a document and a pasted version. I want a workflow that allows me to paste in, or open suggested line edits from an LLM output and it interprets the specified prompt format and allows me to accept changes. I’d also like authorship tracking like iA writer does but much better than the functionality that it provides (another info pane like the one above but for authorship). I’d also like a tool/screen that decomposes the document like MindNode. Lots to do still! But I’m going to get the basics down, and then slowly add more and more features. Whatever is the most pressing.

I think judging an LLM on it’s writing outputs is a complete category error. It’s what they possible with language that is important.

On The Blog

March 2026 | Photo 365

Photo 365 2026. Year 5, Month 3. Photo-a-day for the month of March 2026.

Start Select Reset 📑

Subscribing to SSRZ supports my online work and creative projects.

Get the Zine!
£5/month 💌

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

No spam. No email. Cancel at any time.

Photo 365

Terminal Access

Eddie Rathke had a really great conversation on Wolf pod with the designers of the card game Hare to the Throne launching next month as part of Backerkit’s POCKETOPIA 2026 season.

It was really interesting hearing about the cost barriers involved into entry to TCGs and the designers thoughts on out the box balanced decks and the approach they took towards replicating the experience of a deck collecting rather than you know, collecting, collecting.

Welcome to the new episode of the Wolf Podcast.

Today I’m talking to Jori Kamp and Ernst de Brujin about their upcoming card game Hare to the Throne! We talk about competitive game design, big games v quick games, card games, collectible card games like Magic: The Gathering and Yu-Gi-Oh. Was a great conversation and do sign up for their Backerkit page to get notified when the campaign goes live! Every signup helps.

Reading

Still listening to Liturgies of the Wild: Myths That Make Us by Martin Shaw. I know several people who are just … refusing to read it because of his conversation to Christianity but I think that is just silly. I think this is one of the best books he’s ever written.

Speaking of Christianity, I’m absolutely burning though Our Thoughts Determine Our Lives: The Life and Teachings of Elder Thaddeus of Vitovnica. Like many of the ‘The Life’ books produced by the orthodox church. The book begins with a biography contextualising the life of the holy man, and then follows that up with the spiritual writing. Amazing book. This guy lived though both world wars, had run ins with the Nazi’s and Communists, got bombed in 1999 in Serbia.

Hoavi – Architectonics (LP)

Discovered this Gamalan influenced dub album recently and it was the sound of the grey and cloudy days. On the surface this LP is Dubby electronica but it really shines with it’s exploration of polyrhythm and tonal resonance. Things evolve and progress whilst still staying inside the loop.

I feel like there should be a remix album where each track is 3-4hours long rather than minutes long. I would definitely listen to it. Mesmerizism takes time.

Remember Kids:

The post Everyone Vibe Codes Their Own Markdown Editor Eventually | Weeknotes #434 appeared first on thejaymo.net.

Easter 26

The Chalk

I hope everybody had a lovely Easter weekend. I went back to the chalk and spent some time with my parents. We did some blustery walks along the coast, and also did an enjoyable, albeit bleak, visit to Richborough Castle. A Roman Fort that at one point, was the site of the biggest triumphal arch in the Roman Empire outside of Rome itself. I haven’t been up there since I was in primary school, so it was a very enjoyable visit and a good use of my freshly renewed English Heritage membership. The visitors centre there is full of cool stuff, and features a curated collection of finds from excavations at the site.

I did open my laptop while I was at home, as I had some computational tasks using my daily AI API credit allowance, I didn’t actually spend all that much time at my computer. As I just wanted to spend time hanging out with my parents: going for walks, participating in chaotic church raffles after the Easter service, going to the food fair, and doing odd jobs around the house involving lifting as my Dad’s recent hernia operation is still heals up.

Doom Eternal

The one thing I did do however, was play a lot of Doom Eternal on my Switch 2 whilst I was at home. I’ve owned it for years, but it was basically unplayable and extremely crashy. But it now runs like a dream on the new hardware. I dread to think how many hours I put into the game over the last five days, in the evenings and during the day, drinking cups of tea while mum and dad had the TV on. I’m nearly nearly done with it. I’m just working my way through the last level.

I have decided that Doom Eternal is a ‘good game’, it’s not quite as fun or innovative as Doom 2016. And I don’t find the gameplay loop as satisfying as the original reboot. Initially, I found the increased agility, double jumps, and rushing elements in the movement annoying, as it didn’t ‘feel’ like a Doom game to me. But now I’m however many hours in, I’ve accepted it as part of the affordances provided by the game world..

The game is also far less confusing in terms of wayfinding than the 2016 predecessor. I don’t find myself getting lost as essay. It’s not quite “yellow paint” guidance, but the green light storytelling is very useful for intuiting where you’re supposed to go. I also enjoy the interplay between the first lines of sight and the locations of the hidden secrets satisfying in terms of exploration. Anyway, I didn’t expect to write about my Easter weekend, and end up with a review of Doom Eternal, a six-year old game.

Yes, I spent a lot of time with Doom on my Switch at home, but it was the time I spent with my parents was the best bit of being home. It’s so nice to see them, hang out, and be a part of their world for a couple of days.

Slop Machines

I used both my train journeys from and back to London to work work on Slop Machines and more or less finished the first draft finished; excluding the final chapter. The last chapter on the Slop Machine itself will probably be another 10,000 words of so. But I want to do an editing pass first. I plan to go though the chapters sequentially from start to finish, and make notes as I go about what I’m going to say in the final chapter based on the preceding arguments that make up the bulk of the book.

It’s funny, even though I’ve just got to where I am with the first draft, at its peak, the document was about 75k words. Even before the edit i’ve cut so much stuff out of it already; multiple side quests that interest me, but aren’t necessarily relevant to the argument that I’m trying to build throughout the book. Anyway, I’m extremely pleased.

I’m only three months late with it than I had initially planned. But it is what it is. The original Points and Gestures talk with the same name was given back in December of 2024! And as a result I feel like the ground I’m covering in the text is already out of date. Well after I had initially had these thoughts. 

Monsters in the Mirror is, in fact, a prelude or prequel to Slop Machines. Covering a much wider span of time and history than the book does, which allowed me to get the wider frame of my thoughts in order, and that really helped and benefited the book itself.

Speaking of Monsters in the Mirror, because of the bank holidays, getting the zine issues back from the printer has been slightly delayed. But as soon as they arrive, I’ll be shipping them, hopefully this coming weekend.

Start Select Reset 📑

Subscribing to SSRZ supports my online work and creative projects.

Get the Zine!
£5/month 💌

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

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Photo 365

The Ministry Of My Own Labour

• Finished the first draft of Slop Machines!
• did a great deal of personal and life admin, prepared for my tax return, and generally got my affairs in order.
• I had an interesting conversation over email about my “Hard Worlds For Little Guys” series.
• I also have several other outstanding emails and correspondence I need to respond to.
• In my capacity as an advisor, I worked half a day alongside someone to get to to the bottom of some weirdness between subscriber recurring revenue and the reconciliation between different data sources.

Terminal Access

IYB Robotson Is back in the host chair of his podcast, Neomania.

The newest episode is about DIY Food Futures and Synthetic Ecology with @cyber_plantae from Futurespore. I thoroughly enjoyed it. If you haven’t done so already, you can check out my appearance on show here!

Reading

I finished the audiobook of Children of Strife by Adrian Tchaikovsky on the tube. It’s Book #4 in the Children of Strife series. It’s fantastic. I think this whole series is some of the best of contemporary sci-fi. Really enjoyed it.

Last night I finished The Heart of Prayer by Rupert Spira. Another great entry in his The Essence of Meditation series.

Rounds – Four Tet

For some reasons, perhaps stuck down with the affliction or disease known as nostalgia I’ve ben listening to Rounds by Four Tet. It’s really hard to belive that it came out 23 years ago.

Remember Kids:

The post Easter 2026 | Weeknotes #433 appeared first on thejaymo.net.

Creative Loop

One band is a collective endeavour, two bands make a scene.

I’ve written and talked about all this before so i’m not going to repeat my self. Other than to say that one of the most formative times in my life, and my introduction to ‘the creative world’ was the hardcore punk scene in Margate in the late 90’s and early 00’s. If you wanted culture any culture at all, you had to do it together.

I recently watched this 15 year old lecture by Brian Eno, where he goes into his concept of Scenius in more detail than I have previously come across. So good.

I am aware that the meaning of the term ‘scene’ has been under constant re-negotiation since the Internet arrive, and what a scene ‘is’ and ‘isn’t’ is something people have very strong opinions about, and I’m going to steer clear.

However; years and years ago now, before AI entered mainstream consciousness, I remember having a conversation with Mat Dryhurst about DIY punk and Scenius etc, but the main topic of conversation was about what is like to be in one. And one of the things I took away from that evening in the pub is that ‘scenes’ are so generative because at their core, people produce work for themselves and show it to their friends. All a scene really is, is just people just prompting each other in a tight feedback loop.

With that in mind I want to mention two things that have come back this week as part of the loop.

World Soul Fruit Fight

I received an email this week from Duc de Berry / Billy Crosby creator of the sprawling personal site hoofofconcept.com with a link to a 3 part audio project called World Soul Fruit Fight.

The email opened “monsters in the mirror is my fav bit of media I’ve be consumed so far this year” and then went on to explain they had generated three tracks with Suno, based on outputs from my Slop Machines GTP link where you can chat with the current draft of my in progress book. The grounding for it also contains worldrunning.guide, and a bunch of other unpublished writing.

Track 3 is my favourite. It’s amazing.

Listening to them for the first time, as an experience, was a bit like being inside a hallucination or a dream. The referencing of my ideas and imagery so familiar to me from my creative work comes in an out. There’s a bit about buying a sunset, the screen as a mirror, and the mall of abandoned brands… all appear in track 3 alone. It’s a very weird, wild, and inspiring feeling.

If unlike me, you don’t want to listen to synthetic media, do head over to hoofofconcept.com and browse around. It’s very zanny. I love it.

Claude Skill Creator

I’ve been a bit overwhelmed by the response the to Hard Worlds posts I put out 2 weeks ago. A fork of Anthropic’s official skill creator now exists over on Github, which implements the ontology/theory derived from the knowledge object I supplied alongside the essay .

You can read the full write up on what happens when you use it against a mature skill file on twitter, but I’ve quoted the main results below. Overall, a massive success.

The SKILL.md is now a router that identifies what I’m asking for (drafting a thesis section? reviewing a risks edit? formatting the docx?) and loads only the relevant room file and exemplar. For this deal memo skill, context load per task dropped to 13-19K characters.

That’s a 74-87% reduction.The renderer (render_memo.py) takes a typed JSON intermediate – where each content block has a type like section_header, bullet, labeled_sub_bullet, risk_bullet – and produces the formatted Word document. The model’s job is to classify content into types and populate the text. The script handles fonts, spacing, tab stops, margins, bullet characters, page setup, and numbering and the model never touches python-docx.

The validators run automatically as part of the rendering pipeline. One checks the JSON structure before rendering (does the thesis have deal terms? are there enough risks? is CARR in the financials?). The other checks the text after rendering (e.g. no customer quotes in the body, risk labels under 4 words, CARR figures consistent across sections). I calibrated the structural validator against all 19 of my prior memos (a benefit of being at Battery for 10+ years!) measuring what’s always present, usually present, and sometimes present so the severity levels (fail vs. warn vs. info) reflect actual patterns rather than aspirational rules I came up with in conversation with skill-creator.

The result is that formatting bugs went to seemingly zero for this skill. v1 had a frustrating problem with competitor entries being standalone paragraphs – it was actually stated four times in different locations and still kept failing – and that issue is structurally impossible in v2 because competitor entries are a different content block type than section headers, and the renderer makes them sub-bullets by construction. The model can’t produce the wrong format because the wrong format doesn’t exist in the type system.

I do think this way of thinking about agent environment design has applications far beyond the creation of just skills though. But its early days yet, and the essay is still travelling out into cyberspace. Looking forward to seeing what happens next.

Start Select Reset 📑

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Photo 365

The Ministry Of My Own Labour

• FULLY finished the first draft of chapters 1-9 of SLOP MACHINES. 71k words. I think i’m going to do a big edit pass and and prepare myself for the closing chapter that way.
• Had a great call with Rich from Archetypal.
• Vibe coded my first proper app in AI Studio to get something done, and have been burning though free Gemini API quota every day since lol.
• Got a lot of gossip from pals in the UK game industry, sounds grim.
• Honestly there was drain chaos in my house this week and I lost ALL of Friday to it.

Terminal Access

Publishers weekly starred my friend Andrew Dana Hudson‘s newest novel Absence (our May 5th)

The thoroughness with which Hudson imagines how individuals and society would have to rewire themselves to contend with this bizarre phenomenon lends his tale impressive philosophical heft. The result is a poignant exploration of loss, grief, hope, and the fragility of existence that will resonate with readers beyond the fantasy and horror genres.

Reading

I finished reading The Heart of Prayer by Rupert Spira. It’s very interesting reframing of his first book Being Aware of Being Aware very helpful to see the same argument recast through the language and lens of ‘God’.

Children of Strife by Adrian Tchaikovsky audiobook is out! I’m burning though it! So good!

LULO ELEKTON (Genre)

Last week i wort about how I had been injecting the Indonesian house music into my ears? Well i fell a bit deeper down the rabbit hole and I present to you Lulo Elekton, the hottest night out in Southeast Sulawesi Indonesia.

I have decided that Techno clubs would be 1000% more tolerable nights out in my 40s if they combined Kaely, or Regency era country dancing. What are we doing here in the west? There’s zero cultural innovation happening! meanwhile in Indonesia this is all the rage! And it’s live music!!

Remember Kids:

The post Creative Loop | Weeknotes #432 appeared first on thejaymo.net.

Try Our Best

I must admit, I’ve been feeling a little doomy recently.

Like everybody else, I have no idea what is about to happen. But more importantly, I’ll admit that I have no idea what is going on either. But I do know how I feel, and in turn, I know how those feelings make me act. That has to count for something.

At the time of writing, we are about thirty hours from finding out whether the current global settlement is still to be or not. Whilst I am sleeping; the mad king of an unravelling empire will decide if he steps another rung up the escalation ladder. If he does, there’s no way back down. When I wake up on Tuesday morning, the decision will have been made. The direction of our lives; for the rest of our lives; will be set either way.

It seems strange to think that the story of my own individual, personal problems right now is wrapped up in geopolitical and world historical events. But of course they are. They always have been. It’s just that at certain moments, the seam between the two becomes a bit more visible.

I’ve written before that when things become unreadable, one must learn how to feel. Not because feeling offers certainty, but because certainty is unavailable. Feeling is not a theory of history, it’s not analysis. But it is one way of orienting oneself inside of the confusion. One way of staying human when the world becomes unreal.

The post-Covid world is still hurtling towards us along the tunnel; close enough now to make out the shape of the thing. I have been shocked by the tone and the reporting in the media here in the UK about what that thing is. As someone who was a teenager when the planes hit the towers, another time when the seam was a bit more visible. I’ve watched the current atmosphere gathering over the whole of my adult life. The most coherent story that the people who gathered those clouds are telling us about the future (and the present) has slipped away from them, and towards the stories people have been telling themselves for a while.

Global pandemics, oil wars, crack down on freedoms over terrorism, useless politicians; both national and international, institutions so ideologically captured they can no longer perceive that the story is a dream. Fires and floods, climate, drone war, smartphones, ubiquitous solar, battery storage. The list goes on. None of this is especially shocking or surprising. This is the texture of the near future I grew up with. The Cyberpunk weather forecast the culture wrote for itself.

Meanwhile, for the last decade the hologram has continued to force-feed culture stories of superheroes and exceptional individuals coming to save the day. But out here in the real world, nobody is coming. The politicians and the government; are not here for us, and are not particularly interested in being here either. No rational and pragmatic decisions are being made, and haven’t been since about 2008.

That, I think, is part of the deeper horror I feel. Not simply that things are bad, but that the inherited forms of modernity no longer seem capable of even recognising the nature of the moment they, and by extension we, are in.

The liberal nation-state is, among other things, the story it tells about itself. A social technology held together by newspapers, mass literacy, and the shared imaginary of ‘the nation’, a more or less hegemonic information environment. And has been for four hundred years, give or take. But the conditions that made that story possible have been eroded, if not blasted apart, by the information age. The interfaces have changed, and that has changed the psychic weather. The idea of “the public” has changed too. The old settlement is unwinding either way.

I’m not sure how long that unwinding is going to take. Five years, maybe? Maybe more. But it seems impossible to believe, standing where we are, that the current arrangement can meaningfully hold.

And yet, despite all this, in the main I remain optimistic about the medium term. Not because I think things will resolve cleanly, and not because I think we are on the verge of some redemptive turn, but because history does not stop. New habits, new forms of life, new ways of organising and being together always emerge. The problem is that there is an enormous amount of struggle between here and there.

Everything depends on the extent to which those in power can accept that things are unwinding. Or whether they cling on while the gyre circulates ever faster and faster. Full of velocity and friction. A system overshooting itself.

For those us born in the 1980’s and after; the so called digital natives and citizens of the internet, culture and personalities formed inside one world, are now being forced to build in another. The next ten years, for families and neighbours and towns, and whole countries, things are going to be extremely difficult. I’m not convinced much of the post 2008 condition; culturally, politically, is going to be much use.

In some ways, the last 23 days have been a catalyst for the small gestures that make a difference to me; spring cleaning and decluttering, emptying drawers, wiping down surfaces, processing accumulated stacks of paper, and tidying. Sorting and clearing out. A feathering of the nest, driven by the desire to put one’s house in order.

So what is one supposed to do? Not much, apart from tidying ones room? Nothing can really be done at the level or scale of the problem, or in any kind of register that the people still telling old stories demand.

But one can make habitat. One can clear a desk, sort the papers, wipe the surfaces, and make room. One can refuse the false drama of omniscience. One can resist being ridden by the worst moods of the machine. One can learn how to feel. One can pay attention to family, neighbours, friends, and the real texture of ordinary life.

We need to try our best.

Experience.Computer

Marco Giancotti (Aether Mug)

https://experience.computer/

IN THIS INTERVIEW

Jay Springett and guest Marco Giancotti, a thinking-tool artisan, explore aphantasia, SDAM, and spatial memory. They discuss writing as thinking, cognitive frameworks, and wonder why looking at a picture of a sour fruit (Umeboshi) doesn’t make everyone’s mouth water.

Then they discuss:

• Spatial presence without mental imagery

• The shared ontology of digital and physical objects

• Writing as a process of refactoring thoughts

• “Framing” and “virtual physics” as cognitive tools

A huge thank you to Marco for responding so enthusiastically to my Bluesky DMs after I spent an afternoon binge-reading his fantastic blog, Aether Mug — which is definitely not about science, philosophy, philosophers, languages, Japan, or picture frames, or boxes, (though you’d be forgiven for thinking otherwise).

Marco had some really nice things to say about his appearance on the show, his blog is fantastic check it out.

Last week I had a lot of fun being interviewed by Jay Springett of Experience.Computer. Jay runs a truly unique podcast, focused specifically on an activity that I feel people should do and share more: “curious introspection”, or the careful examination of what your consciousness and perception are like and feel like from the inside. I care about it so much that I maintain a living list of my and others’ introspective descriptions.

The moment you start reading/listening to this kind of mental spelunking you realize how deep, varied, and mysterious it all is. We (including our scientists) have only scratched the surface in our understanding of these matters.

On The Blog

Huge week for new posts this week. Put out about 15k worth of words on the blog this week over 4 posts. It’s all indexed and linked from the post below. basically summarising the last 5 years of thinking; both independently and professionally, about software environments and tecno-social systems as worlds.

When a language model is given tools and set to work on a task, it wakes up inside a world.

These three essays are about what the shape of that world might be, and why it matters more than most people building agents currently assume.

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The Ministry Of My Own Labour

• Put out experience.computer
• Edited and posted the Worlds posts above
• Had a long and very cool call with Japan about bunraku pupperty, ai agents, hatsune miku and the state of Vtubers/virtual idols in 2026.
• Started sorting out ‘my financial affairs’ lol such a long job. Want to get my tax return done super early.

Terminal Access

This is a very good essay directly tackling the “Stochastic Parrot” framing of LLMs, and how almost all the claims in the original paper were false even at the time of writing. It’s a must read, or article to send to the people in your life who are still clinging to this understanding.

Perhaps the most influential single paper on the public perception of LLMs is On the Dangers of Stochastic Parrots: Can Language Models Be Too Big?. It is, however, a bit of a mash-up, and credibly seems like it should have been at least two papers. One of those papers raises many valid concerns about the ethical implications and impacts of AI training and use. Another makes the claim in the title, that an LLM is a “stochastic parrot” operating “without any reference to meaning.”

That core claim is either irrelevant or completely wrong in every detail, both in how it is commonly understood and in its technical assertions. It hamstrings AI ethics as a field, providing a veneer of technical justification for ignoring many problems.

Reading

I’m currently reading Impromptu Man: J.L. Moreno and the Origins of Psychodrama, Encounter Culture, and the Social Network by Jonathan D. Moreno. And when I find a good spot to and i’m feeling more sleepy, i’m switching over to The Heart of Prayer by Rupert Spira. It’s giving me weird dreams.

I hope to finish some of these books before Tchaikovsky’s Children of Strife drops in audiobook next week.

Funkot (Genre)

No specific track to recommend this week, as I’ve just been listening to hours and hours of the Indonesian genre: Funkot. It’s basically 190-220bpm house music thats been made with the default sound banks found on on Yamaha and Casio keyboards.

And on to of that… people… line dance to it?

Everything about this is amazing.

Remember Kids:

The post Try Our Best | Weeknotes #431 appeared first on thejaymo.net.