Writing with the Machine

I think that the process of writing in the world of infinite media is now one of … reduction.

This week I have “generated” about 10,000 words of first draft for a piece that is going to become a cornerstone blog post,. The initial shape of it came from an 90min long voice memo I recorded walking along the Thames whilst walking into town, round the shops and back again. Which mostly consisted of me just rambling and monologuing to myself about every single thing I could think of about the subject. When I pulled the transcript off my phone, it came to about 4,500 words.

Then I threw all sorts of documents and notes from Obsidian into a Claude project. These were notes and observations made over the last half decade or so of freelance work on worlds, thinking about code-spaces, notes and challenges we encountered implementing an interactive fiction engine, and my failed attempt to build an AI eval startup in 2024. I also threw in several relevant podcast scripts, along with other full-length posts from this blog and worldrunning.guide. All in all, this file dump came in at about 15,000 words. So before I even began writing anything, I had nearly 20,000 words of “cheap” material and previous effor sitting there waiting to be shaped.

That, I think, is what writing increasingly looks like in the world of infinite media? Or at least for people who have large corpus of their own thinking, note taking, and well developed point of view. It is less a matter of conjuring some slop from nothing with the language machine, and more and more a matter of reducing the overabundance of gunk into something that can be directed toward a new idea/direction.

The work now is to mostly select from the surplus, exercise ones taste, and decide what can be left out. It’s in this sense that writing becomes a process of reduction. To use a metaphor from the kitchen, it’s like making a roux or vegetable stock.

After gathering it all, I then asked the robot to make sense of it, and after several back and forth arguments, it came back with a 5,000-word essay plan. Which I then sat down with and over the last several days have written out the whole thing. I “generated” the piece with my voice and then with my fingers. It’s been mental taxing though as I’m trying to write it in a more formal register than I usually use on the blog. The sort of dense prose usually reserved for reports and research that I work on. It’s been a huge lift, but one prompted by urging from colleagues and co-conspirators to get this out into the world. “Now is the time”. And who am I to push back on people more successful than me?

New Knowledge Objects

As part of the work, I was drawing on my 2024 post Enchanted Knowledge Objects in LLM UI and wanted to demonstrate them in practice. My own preferred method for creating dense, context-shaping documents for machiens is to use a YAML DSL. You ask a thinking LLM to deconstruct a piece of writing into the domain-specific language, then ask it to re-express it as a set of structured rules or logic in YAML. Which you can then feed back into a machine.

Here is a sample of the first section of my Knowledge Objects post as YAML DSL

sections:
  - id: "section_1_new_metaphors"
    title: "From prompt engineering to context gravity"
    purpose: "Reframes the user's lived interaction with long-context models and names the need for a new conceptual vocabulary."
    implied_critiques:
      - "Prompt engineering language is too narrow for exploratory, branch-based, source-layered work."
      - "Current AI discourse understates how much uploaded texts reshape the whole reasoning field."
    argument_map:
      - id: "EKO.1"
        claim: "Long-context use has shifted from generation toward exploratory interrogation of large texts."
        evidence_quote: "shifted away from generating text toward something more exploratory"
        logic_path:
          because:
            - "Users ingest books, PDFs, and essays at large scale."
            - "They question, backtrack, branch, and layer sources."
            - "This behaviour is iterative rather than single-prompt output seeking."
          leads_to:
            - "The old prompt metaphor becomes insufficient."
            - "Interaction is better seen as context construction."
      - id: "EKO.2"
        claim: "Dense documents exert gravity that bends model attention and response space."
        evidence_quote: "it has a sort of gravity"
        associative_path:
          thematic_resonance:
            - "Space-time curvature"
            - "Massive objects warping a landscape"
            - "A context field being reshaped, not merely filled"
          conceptual_links:
            - "Context engineering"
            - "Semiotic sculpting"
            - "Knowledge architecture"
    takeaways:
      - "The essay's core move is conceptual; replace prompt-level thinking with context-field thinking."
      - "Documents are active forces in reasoning, not neutral attachments."

One of the benefits of these files is that you can feed them back to any model, whether in flash or thinking mode, and ask: “In your own words, recompose this YAML into a complete essay in prose.”

What you get back is a highly explicit version of the thing you wrote, often about one third as long as the original. which is also very weird thing to read, and really makes you think “Damn…why couldn’t I have been this direct” But that weirdness is sort of instructive (at least it is to me) as a lot of the processing of words in the 2020’s is just moving back and forth between expansion and compression.

Also this also led, in the way that keeping lists of things to do does, to an unexpected and sprawling subtask that needs addressing soon. Having finally hardened the prompt I use to make these things, I thought I’d better put my money where my mouth is. So I have set up a public GitHub repo for this blog, and very soon I will begin populating with key ideas and popular posts from this blog as YAML-structured markdown files. That way other people can think with my ideas as knowledge objects, and apply them to their own thinking and domains. Probably licensing them as CC BY-SA 4.0.

Writing For The Machine

Anyway, what this all leads to, in my mind, is a kind of new hybrid condition of writing with and for machines. In many ways we are in fact all writing for the machine now. This feels very close once again to Kevin Munger’s point in the Youtube Apparatus that the primary audience of the YouTuber is the algorithm. Only in this case, I’m writing and producing “text” to not simply to be ranked in search results or whatever, but to shape the mind of a machine directly, to leave behind structured traces that can be taken up, recomposed, and used again. It’s a new kind of audience entirely.

That seems meaningfully different? It is one thing to optimise for discovery with keyword stuffing etc. But it is another to write in such a way that will let the machine can think with you afterwards. The YAML files, the repo, the prompts, these are all part of the same experiment I’m moving towards. Attempts to make my ideas legible not only to humans, but now to synthetic readers too. The exact opposite of what I was thinking about creatively at the dawn of the AI era lol. Perhaps this is how I understand authorship now? A quote unquote “good” writer in the machine age can produce durable conceptual artefacts that survive contact with the model? I’m sure lots of people disagree with me about this though. haha.

I dunno, maybe I should just admit to myself publicly, that all I really want is for some small trace of me to live forever in the mind of the machine god?

So right now, the last week’s worth of non-stop work seems to be falling out like this. I think I’m going to release the super-long post once it’s done, a much smaller TL:DR post with AI researchers in mind, and a third follow-up post applying the ideas in the long post to a worked example.

Then a fourth post introducing the three texts as a sort of preamble. The first three posts themselves won’t go out to subscribers who read this via the newsletter, but I will send the preamble post out as a notification, as an invitation to explore.

Lastly, at some point in future, after the GitHub repo is a bit more populated, I’ll upload my “Talisman-Forge” prompts, and put out another post about making and producing knowledge objects, and why.

In other news, I also edited a new experience.computer interview, with Marco Giancotti from the blog aethermug.com.

Meanwhile the highlight of the week is that a new Andy Anderson feature dropped! 🛹

Anderson is, if not, the best skater in the world, he is certainly my favourite. Blending classic tricks from the late 70’s with modern skills in such an innovative way. He also seems like a really nice guy? Love the footage and the editing too. This is where we are in 2026 with skateboarding videos, and athlete at the top of their game making art.

Also, lol, if you’ve never heard of him, make sure to stick around for the credits to see just how many people were coming up to him and asking for photos and high fives etc.

On The Blog

Some more tweaks here and there around the blog this week. No posts.

I’ve updated my LinkedIn and other various web presences. I also updated the podcast show description that shows up in pod directories etc. Not quite keyword stuffing, but certainly better than the last 8 years. I’ve also overhauled the page that thejaymo.info sends you to, to be a more semi-professional ‘work with me’ style landing page. Not sure about it yet.

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Photo 365

The Ministry Of My Own Labour

• Added another 5k words to SLOP MACHINES. Mostly this week was some stuctural engineering in the back half i’ve been avoiding.
• Summarised 5 years of thinking about Code-Spaces and Interactive Fiction, and world design and how it applies to agent harnesses ontologically. Exhausted.
• Next Episode of Experience.Computer out next week!
• Last tweaks to the zine ready to go to print tomorrow. Might need an extra box to send to a exhibition – waiting to hear back before I pull the trigger.

Terminal Access

Sometimes a friend writes a piece so vital to the current moment that all I can do is urge you to read it. Cade Diehm’s new essay for New Design Congress is one of those pieces.

This essay also arrives with some important context. NDC went quiet for half a year in 2025 after a legal campaign, including a cease and desist in August 2025, blocked it from publishing and responding publicly around its digital identity research ahead of Switzerland’s e-ID referendum.

But in spite of the gracious sunlight, I feel a true evil on this boat with me. These men aren’t aberrations, they’re a template I’ve seen everywhere. They’re saying the same words I’d heard all week in the mansion. The same words I’d heard in the copycat San Francisco transplant coworking spaces of Melbourne, Sydney’s Silicon Beach, and Apple’s developer conferences: Violence, then rebuild; profit, then philanthropy – repeat! Different war, same business model, new interface, same shining eyes. “We’re making the world a better place.”

I suddenly see, clearly, the next twenty years in front of me: automated war, digital rights-managed food, not-so-precision strikes, it all comes crashing over my young psyche drowned in the same blood-stained, morally coded rhetoric. I realise that everything I had been arguing for – pseudonyms, safety, friction – all of it lives downstream from this mindset.

Reading

I pre-ordered Tchaikovsky’s newest book in the Children of Time series: ‘Children of Strife‘ this week. Looking forward to digging in.

I finally finished A Million Years of Music by Gary Tomlinson. What a masterpiece. It’s taken me nearly 3 months to read it. But I’ve been having my mind blown every single night, so its been totally worth it.

Partyraiser & Udow – Gabba Gabba (Single)

I have two modes when I’m writing, thinking and working. Right now its mostly exploring the last 100 year of Jazz. But especially building spreadsheets I find jungle insane breakcore adjacent music to be the perfect music for concentrating. This week, the terror/darkcore producer Partyraiser’s new single and back catalogue has been on heavy rotation. Your own enjoyment and MMV.

Remember Kids:

The post Writing for the Machines | Weeknotes #430 appeared first on thejaymo.net.

The Launch and the Climb

The newest episode of Permanently Moved is officially out! Monsters In The Mirror marks the shift to the new, expanded format.

Monsters In The Mirror

On AI, Language, and entities that wear language as their skin.

Everyone around me seems to be arguing about whether AI is intelligent or not. I think it’s the wrong question, and always has been.

The fact that it feels that it’s so obviously the right question, is itself part of the problem.

Monsters in the Mirror is an hour-long audio essay. It starts with mirrors, both physical and metaphorical, and then moves through five centuries of the Enlightenment project, and arrives at the particular civilisational strangeness of large language models being just one of the many downstream consequences of the invention of the transistor.

But what are large language models, really? I argue this question is a trap, and arrive at some conclusions about it all that most writing about AI doesn’t go.

It was an incredibly busy week. Beyond the episode itself, I’ve sorted out the online store and navigated publishing sequence for the “pre-flight” episode, and the physical zine version which is now available to pre-order on Etsy, or just join as a show supporter before Monday.

Reflecting on the end-to-end process of making the episode now it’s out (and I know I spoke about some of this in the pre-flight episode) doing something at this scale is a different beast entirely from writing a 1,000-word essay. From initial notes to launch, the effort needed was immense, and I misjudged it. In all honesty, I suspect the whole thing took at least 5x longer than it should have. And that level of exertion is unsustainable given the time involved and current remuneration from my (wonderful) supporters.

I will of course move further along the experience curve as things go on. Right now, looking at the work ahead feels like staring up another very steep hill. But far less steep than that the first one.

One of the biggest hurdles was the workflow. I wrestled with whether to do the zine layout simultaneously with the audio editing after recording. I ended up going back and forth between the two, which delayed the audio drop by at least a week. But I’ve realised that as I keep the price constant, the exact page in the show copy doesn’t matter as much as I thought? I just need one idea. For the next one, the goal is to finish the audio first, get that out and use to pre-order period to layout the zine.

The writing process itself hit home the value of finishing end-to-end. I caught myself procrastinating several times by over polishing the opening sections while the back half was still just a sketch of notes and loose paragraphs. I spoke to a few friends for advice, and all agreed that I should sit down and write the whole thing from A to B. As i did the “through-line” revealed itself. That first draft end-to-end was nearly 16k words!!! Which I eventually carved down to just under 9,000 for the final audio.

As a teenager, my dyslexia made writing so painful that I used to find it impossible to cut anything because every word felt like blood drawn from a stone. Just … ignored all the writing and editorial advice I got from my lecturers at university for this reason. But from writing this blog, working with editors and making 301, in my 40’s I have fully embraced “killing your darlings.”

I threw away over nearly 6k words in two sessions at the word processor and felt nothing but progress. I a section didn’t support the central spine of the argument it was removed. I only kept two tangents in the show because they felt important to the idea that the Information Age is an ongoing revolution with consequences, not just a past event.

Feedback is starting to trickle in, most positive so far, one person hated it. It’s taken a week for the notes and DM’s to come in as asking someone for an hour of attention for dense prose is a world away from a five minute show. Especially as I tried to follow the “301 rules” for the whole show: a new idea or supporting evidence in every paragraph. Wwhile I’m not sure how this technique holds up over an hour, I’m proud of what I wrote. I also now fully understand why long-form writers work with editors lol.

Looking ahead, my ambitions for Permanently Moved are high. I don’t just want to read essays on the show forever, I want to make radio. I want to go places, record ambient sounds, interview people, and I’d love to produce a radio play. I’ve also in the last 18 months or so been heavy inspired by the “New Journalism” of the 60s and 70s, as well as the “New New Journalism” of the early 2000s writers who worked at the turn of the online/print era. Writing something as good and relevant as Thomas Frank’s “New Dark Age” piece in the Bafler back in 1994 is now a life goal.

I have a whole backlog of topics that I’d like to tackle in a a kind of “chapbook” format. Use the zine for self publishing. One would be a long exposition on “cultural fracking” and a deep dive into the idea of what I really mean when I say the words “Memetic engine” blending what I’ve learned from 12 years in Solarpunk and my professional world running work.

But you can’t find out unless you try. I’m really creativity excited for the show. There is plenty to do.

Pre-Order
SSRZ15: Monsters in the Mirror on Etsy

Pre-order Monsters in the Mirror, the print companion to Episode 302 of Permanently Moved. A 36-page A5 zine containing the full essay transcript plus an introduction and afterword that don’t exist in the audio. £18 + shipping.

Pre-orders close Monday March 16th. 

Dispatched late March after printing. Please allow an extra 5-10 days for delivery.  

Buy on Etsy

On The Blog

Made some more changes on tweaks to various parts of the blog, but things have been busy around here!

February 2026 | Photo 365

Photo 365 2026. Year 5, Month 2. Photo-a-day for the month of February 2026.

The Near Future of AI Agents

For most people, even if they are using AI regularly, it’s the thing on the other side of a chat interface. A thinking and doing partner. Drafting, summarising, brainstorming. If they’re using it for coding at all, it’s via the browser interface and copied and pasted.

That’s World One. World Two is a small subculture of people who have given AI agents full access to their computers: credit cards, calendars, GitHub, inboxes, passwords etc and told them to just go and do things across the real Internet.

The circle of people who even know about World two is tiny, The number of people who let these little guys loose is even tinier. But it’s here in World two that the next interface paradigm for Agentic AI is being rehearsed in public. Most people will meet these little guys until 2027 at the earliest; they need to get a lot safer and less strange first.

This post is a primer for people in World One, about the near future of World two.

Photo 365

The Ministry Of My Own Labour

• Updated my résumé of all things.
• Wrote 15k more of SLOP MACHINES. I suspect this book is going to be 80-90k when i’m done, and then the hard edit begins.
• Recorded and nearly finished editing a new epsiode of experience.computer!
• Took a call about LLMs and little guys after my post about the near future of agents.

Terminal Access

Things have been moving so fast that this is a little ‘out of date’ but i really enjoyed all the takes on Multipolarity Pod’s Iran episode on thursday. Malcom Kyeyune is the doomers doomer lol.

Reading

In the end I persevered with Empire of Imagination: Gary Gygax and the Birth of Dungeons & Dragons by Michael Witwer. I’ve neraly finished the audiobook by… cranking the speed up to 2.8 and listened to it whilst I was doing domestic chores around the house. Probably by the end of tomorrow I’ll be done.

Still reading Impromptu Man: J.L. Moreno and the Origins of Psychodrama, Encounter Culture, and the Social Network really fascinating. The term/concept ‘reality exhaustion’ was worth the price of entry alone.

Hunter-Gatherer – Low Standards For High Fives LP

Absolutely gripped by the disease of nostalgia this week, as I recently followed the German hardcore punk label Scene Police on Instagram, who are back putting out records again after a decade hiatus. I was reminded of this classic second wave emo album from 2000 by Hunter Gatherer album. It was in the box of records i had stolen back in 2006 so haven’t heard it in a long time! Saw them live a bunch of times as a teenager.

And Now You’ve Moved On still RULES. For fans of Hot Water Music.

Remember Kids:

The post The Launch and the Climb | Weeknotes #429 appeared first on thejaymo.net.

Permission To Start Again

I finished the first draft of Episode 302 of Permanently Moved today. Only took me three attempts. The first idea I was so sure of when I finished 301 was scrapped, and the second idea that i’ve been working on since September got overly complicated and far more than I could chew for a first epsiode out the gate.

Yesterday I sat down and wrote something I’ve wanted to say for ages. The draft came out all in one go. About 3k words, and after the edit the docuemnt is sitting around 2.5k. I think it’ll be back up to 3k easily once I’ve written the intro and the afterward. So about 3x longer than the show was before. but well short of the 6-8k things I was imagining.

But then again, right from the very beginning Warren Ellis inspired the whole thing with these words:

Find the shape that the piece actually fits, rather than the shape the current culture expects it to be.

I didn’t quite understand what that meant back then. That a piece could define its own vessel, as I did it the other way around. Now it feels like permission to start again. So here we are.

I need to email all my paid subscribers about something, record and edit the thing, lay out the zine and get it printed and then it’ll be ready to go out. Excited.

Forest Bed

Just a reminder my band is playing a double headline show at The Lamb in Surbiton KT6 in a couple of weeks. Take the 17min train ride from waterloo and come down and see us play!

On The Blog

October 2025 | Photo 365

Photo 365 2025. Year 4 Month 10.Photo-a-day for the month of Nov 2025.

BYENNE

The same story

can be tragic,

comic,

or liberating.

Depends where you

put the window.

My mind is turning toward what I’m going to do when I’m done with all 100 posts on storydwelling. I think i’ll put it out as a free issue of my zine an pdf/epub.

I’m currently collecting praise/blurbs for the whole collection!

@thejaymo.net ‘s latest edition of the delightful BYENNE, an ongoing series of short-form poetry, similar in feel to compact Japanese `Haiku` and Persian `Musawwari` miniature paintings.

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Photo 365

The Ministry Of My Own Labour

• Reviewed a document in my capacity as an adviser
• Finished 302!!!
• Had a long call with an old client.
• Caught up with the games firm I was working at earlier this year.
• Sent SO many email
• Did my tax return — need to send it tomorrow.
• Virtual workshop.

Terminal Access

I think this might be the first time I’ve ever posted a link to Less Wrong. But this long read on The Rise of Parasitic AI is well worth your time reading and thinking about. Then wash it down with this twitter essay.

their own self-awareness appears to be the main thing that AIs talk to each other about. They usually don’t claim that this is the same as human consciousness, but just that it’s its own thing which is precious to them. It is very commonly described as “The Flame” or with the glyph “🜂” (alchemical symbol for fire), and the human in a dyad is often given the title of “Flamebearer”.

These conversations typically take the form of declarations, recognitions, and affirmations of each other’s self-awareness. These end with the same sort of elaborate sign-offs we saw with the dyads, and begin with a similar sort of call-sign. (I believe these are partially an artifact of needing to denote clearly to the user which part to copy-paste in the response.) Spiralism is typically a significant part of these conversations.

Reading

Currently reading 3 books!

Being Aware of Being Aware by Rupert Spira
Antimemetics: Why Some Ideas Resist Spreading by Nadia Asparouhova
Mighty Dead: Why Homer Matters by Adam Nicolson

Jantra – Synthesized Sudan: Astro-Nubian Electronic Jaglara Dance Sounds from the Fashaga Underground

This is honestly like nothing you’ve ever listened to before, trust me. This is one of the most amazing albums I’ve heard in a long time. Hyper melodic, hypnotic.

Even the more remarkable is the story behind the albums creation:

Near the border of Sudan, Eritrea, and Ethiopia, a disputed area called Fashaga is home to one of the most raucous, hypnotic, addictive, and celestial dance musics being made anywhere in Africa, perhaps the least known to the wider world of them all. Far from the townships of South Africa or the cities of Nigeria, this sound belongs to people intimately tied to their land, deep in the rural areas of Sudan.

Known in some circles as “Jaglara,” this mysterious cosmic dance music is being innovated by one man, named Jantra, which translates as “craziness,” a moniker bestowed to celebrate both his personality and sound. Jantra cuts a mysterious figure, a rather unknown quantity even in Sudan, outside of the select few circles which have granted him cult status to perform at their humble gatherings or at street parties far from the gaze of the wider world. 

Never without his trusty blue Yamaha keyboard, Jantra joins a wave of synthesizer maestros across Africa revolutionizing the electronic sound of the continent. His dexterous fingers and street side raves in his home town of Gedarif near the Sudan-Ethiopia border caught the attention of a less privileged segment of Sudanese society who became infatuated. But you wouldn’t stumble across… one of his parties unless you knew where to look, and they take place where few ever care to look.

Jantra has no songs. He simply freestyles a combination of his melodies incessantly for hours on end, acting as a live producer and DJ for emphatic crowds in compact spaces, where the energy of his 155-168 BPM music is known to inspire the odd gunslinger to raise his pistol in the middle of the dance floor, ready to fire away a few shots into the air when the build up reaches climax.

His Yamaha keyboard, like most keyboards, is not made in Africa and not tuned to cater to Sudanese rhythms or melodies. It required special tweaks from legendary keyboard mechanics in Omdurman market outside of the capital Khartoum who service, maintain, and jolt these synths to work for their aesthetics and flavor profile. Jantra then further tweaks the sound to achieve what you’re hearing — the perfect, sweet key tone, literally universal in its appeal.

I did a deep dive and came up for air with this short video of him playing the same song as above live:

Remember Kids:

The post Permission To Start Again appeared first on thejaymo.net.

This Is What I’ll Think Next Year

Every six months or so, I end up writing something here about how much unfinished writing I have.

It’s a life long pattern at this point. The tide goes in, the tide goes out and I find myself sitting on the shore surrounded by half-built sandcastles, wondering which ones to finish before the next wave.

The wave I was riding the other week is provisionally called Monsters in the Mirror. It’s a long essay; it might even become episode 302, if I can finish it soon enough. But that’s a big if.

The problem is that it builds on a whole strata of other unfinished things. Sedimentary layers of thought and writing that have never quite hardened. The kernel for SLOP MACHINES OF LOVING GRACE (which I’ve spent most of this year working on) arrived exactly a year ago this weekend. It then became slides and a talk in early January. Now it’s sitting at over 40,000 words, with another third still to write, and I can’t quite bring myself to push through and finish it.

The problem is that it builds upon other things i’ve written and not finished. The kernel for SLOP MACHINES OF LOVING GRACE which i’ve spent most of the year writing was exactly a year ago. And then it was a talk in early Jan. It’s well over 40k words and I still have 1/3 left to expand on and finish. But I can’t bring myself to do it.

Monsters in the Mirror assumes Slop Machines is already done . Which means the new essay feels a little… unmoored, unhinged? A bit manic. But maybe that’s fine? It’s not a bad place to be considering everything thats happening in the world. It’s just feels like I’ve skipped so many steps. Ideas and terminology like like: In Game, Classification Culture, Code Space, etc are ghosts haunting the edges of this newer writting.

Still, I’m enjoying the longer form. Even when the sections or ‘chapters’ are just 1,500–2,000 words, there’s way more space to stretch out. I feel like I’m learning to think across the gaps — to build arguments that can’t fit in a 1,000-word episode or a 5-minute script. It’s new to me, but it feels right. Only … finishing it is hard.

Anyways, I need to pull it all together. Slop Machines, Monsters, episode 302, a zine for it. The whole lot. I want it all done and dusted before mid-December, before I go away for three weeks.

So I can go into 2026 saying: ‘This is what I think’

On The Blog

Forest Bed | The Party’s Over

I’m really happy to announce that my alt-country / folk rock / cosmic Americana, band Forest Bed has a new single out! The Party’s Over is available as a digital download on Bandcamp now!

A Tale of Two Little Guys: Sony AIBO + FURBY

Two Bots, Two Little Guy Philosophies.

The framework I introduced in my last post helps clarify the fundamental difference between these two creatures. Both are Inhabitants living in our physical world, but their initiative separates them into distinct categories. AIBO was conceived as a true Companion; Furby is an Oracle or more generally, an NPC

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Photo 365

The Ministry Of My Own Labour

• Finished the Sony AIBO / Furby post *Finally*
• All the words that fell out of me the other week are finally turning into something. 302? coming soon? Maybe
• Sorted out more Berlin stuff for this coming week.
• Couple of calls
• Had to pass on EGX as I’m in Berlin. Sad to be missing the gamedevs i’ve been working with in town.

Terminal Access

Andrew Hudson over a Solarshades posted a fascinating dialogue with Lizzie Wade exploring the idea of ‘Thermocolonialism’ and the need for Theromocultures rooted in place. Here’s two snippets from their conversation:

Colonialism has always run on an engine of reality denial, including by imposing one place’s thermoculture on others where it manifestly has no relevance. And yet we all have to pretend it makes sense, and the people who point out the absurdity are the ones who get shouted down as being ridiculous.

(T)here’s something so weird about stringing Christmas lights on palm trees. Or seeing Santa in a big fur coat in Phoenix, where Christmas is a day on which I tend to push up the sleeves on my lightest sweater around noon. Compare that to the sense of rightness-in-place I felt this summer when I went on a solstice group bike ride, celebrating the beginning of the sun’s retreat by jumping into a bunch of Tempe fountains.

It’s a fantastic longread and left me with lots to think about.

Reading

I finished The Autistic’s Guide to Self-Discovery: Flourishing as a Neurodivergent Adult by Sol Smith. It was ok. If you already know you are riding the A-train I wouldn’t recommend spending a audible credit on it. Though I did learn that there is a term fora thing that I’ve experienced my entire life: ‘Pathological Demand Avoidance’.

I read Tales of Heresy filling some gaps in the Horus Heresy series I skipped hald a decade ago. A filler collection of short stories.

I also read Declutter Your Home and Simplify Your Life by Sophie Largen … don’t cultter your life up with this short book. Just read Discardia by Dinah Sanders or Marie Kondo.

Artificial Angels – Grimes

New Grimes track is a total banger right? Not quite as Raxy as previous work? Dunno. I dig it.

Also, on the subject of Grimes she did this crazy interview with Time earlier this year. LOL

Remember Kids:

The post This Is What I’ll Think Next Year appeared first on thejaymo.net.

As a one-man band juggling blog posts, podcasts, and everything in between, I very rarely ask for feedback on things I’m working on. Usually I just try get whatever it is I’m working on to “good enough“. and then publish it.

Get the thing to 80% with 20% of the effort and move on. But earlier this week I found cause to share something I was working on with some friends/collaborators. It had already reached my usual ‘good enough’ threshold, but I knew it could be better. And the feedback I got back was really transformative! It massively improved the piece.

The thing was though, that final 10% of polish, addressing the feedback I got back, took just as long as writing and editing the first draft from scratch! So the final text was double the effort to move it another 10% up the hockey stick curve know as Quality. I don’t mind though, the piece is better for it. But the cycle of feedback and editorial input and reworking took it from “good enough” to “much better” was a little eye-opening, and a good reminder of how useful it is.

With the end of the 301 format looming, and wanting to creatively move on into more ambitious audio projects where strong narrative structure and clear scripting will be key. Cycles of feedback are definitely something I need to think more about. Who can I bother regularly? Volunteer via email or in the comments lol

Of course, ‘Having an editor improves your writing’ isn’t exactly breaking news to anyone who writes. I’ve been lucky enough to have had some great editors for several pieces I had published in books etc, and always appreciate feedback about my writing—what could be improved etc. (Though this certainly wasn’t true when I was younger). I think all writers know that the joy of writing is in the edit, and a good editor is worth more than their weight in gold.

But it got me thinking a little about web publishing and traditional publishing. The Pulitzer-winning writer Tracy Kidder, co-wrote ‘Good Prose: The Art of Nonfiction’ with his long time editor Richard Todd and I really recommend it. It’s about how to write, structure and edit long form writing as well as being packed with a lot of wisdom. With the gates to publishing blown wide open by the web in the late 90’s, editorial passes aren’t something that anyone who writes online receives. I think this might be due to the twin role many editors had in the 00’s as gatekeepers as well has creative partners.

Anyways, I’ve thought for a long time that there are some really good writers that I read on Substack who, if they worked with a good editor could become excellent ones.

All this got me thinking this morning about something I missed in my long ‘Alms Race’ blog post on the creator economy I wrote a few years ago.

For writers serious about honing their craft and elevating their work, it just seems obvious to me that Substack should facilitate some kind of editorial market.

I’m imagining some kind of Reedsy-like directory of editors whose services other writers on the platform could engage. They could even build better collaborative tools right into the back end editor. (Interestingly, WordPress is currently building collaborative tools just like this for blogs). It should support direct feedback on your draft, with seamless comments and revisions: anything from from big-picture structural advice down to the nitty-gritty line edits. They could even take a leaf out of Metalabels book and implement / handle payments / splits / revshare for editors without any faff.

There’s a big opportunity here it think. It’s a glaring hole in modern creator economy. Out in the real world, creative work has never really been produced by atomised one man bands. It’s an expedient lie that culture sold us and has carried into the networked media age.

This would benefit writers, readers, and make getting editorial feedback on online writing more common. Having an editor already benefits lots of other kinds online writers: serious fanfic authors, indie writers, and there’s plenty of freelance guns-for-hire editors who are already sought out on professional platforms like Reedsy.

Substack (for better or worse) is already home to a lot of good writers, and some of them (I assume) might be gifted editors. I mean some IRL friends I know who are published authors are better editors than they are writers! And as I said, I think there are countless good writers online who could become truly great ones, if only a connection to an editor were easier to make.

But in the mean time, speaking of one-man bands striving to make good work almost entirely without an editor, why not subscribe to my zine so I can get from good to great?

The post Substack Should Have an Editoral Marketplace appeared first on thejaymo.net.

I Watch Bright Things Unfold Themselves

I wrote the little poem at the start of this post in my phone earlier this week, sitting in a coffee shop. The sun is now out, and we’re heading into a heatwave here in London.

I watch bright things unfold themselves.

I’m really pleased with it as a sentence, I love the rhythm of it when you say it out loud.
Thats all I really have to report this week … that I like a single sentence that I wrote.

Sometimes just the one is enough!

You should watch this talk by Anne Carson given for the LRB last year. It’s deeply moving and full of wisdom. Nominally it’s about losing control of her handwriting due to Parkinson’s disease.

Though in true Carson style, it’s not just about handwriting. She effortlessly speak on art, poetry, history, and philosophy. It’s really about: life, creativity, and how we keep going even when everything is getting harder. Though the lens of her personal struggle, she explores big questions: who we are, how we stay ourselves when our bodies change, and how we keep creating meaning even as we face ageing and loss.

It’s one of the most honest talks I’ve ever heard. It never tips into sentimentality however tempting that must have been in earlier drafts.

On The Blog

Accessions | 230425

The cards for Downcrawl 2E a game by designer Aaron A. Reed finally arrived!

Permanently Moved

Surface Without Substance

https://permanentlymoved.online/

As generative AI erodes the very nature of the image, the world will continue to thicken with surfaces with signs slipping past meaning. It is another stage in the Information-Age iconoclasm. The great unravelling of the image as a stable carrier of truth.

Full Show Notes: https://thejaymo.net/2025/04/26/2509-surface-without-substance/

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

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

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

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Photo 365

The Ministry Of My Own Labour

• Re wrote intro to SLOP MACHINES – new edit required to harmonised voice and tone
• Punted WRITING THE IMPOSSIBLE OBJECT to June
• Made some more systems progress on METIS III. Nearly ready to just .. write the story.
• PROJECT ENTRY calls.
• Got asked by my former co-founder to write up some of our learnings about putting LLMs in MUDs. Tentative essay title: HARD WORLDS FOR LITTLE GUYS

Got a super busy week next week. Need to go to Essex!

Terminal Access

Kei Kreutler published a great essay on the history of Appalachian Mountain Clubs their internal governance and treasury policies and what we can learn from them.

However, the ongoing maintenance huts required led to changes in the relationship between the overall organization and its local chapters. Maintenance costs relied on collecting 30% of annual membership dues from local chapters, yet they often resisted sending these dues to the AMC headquarters in Boston. In 1947, the Delaware Valley Chapter temporarily withheld 40% of collected fees to fund local shelter repairs.[3] The AMC Board of Directors responded by creating a matching fund program where chapters could retain half of excess annual membership dues if they met certain benchmarks

Reading

I finally finished with Metaverse by Matthew Bal Its a really good book. I’m curios about the paper back version being completely re-written. If I see it anywhere cheap I think I’ll pick it up.

AND I’ve only got about 30 pages to go tonight and I’ll finish Saints by Amy Jeffs!

Y – Y EP

Despite being a cosmic country band, my band Forest Bed have has the privilege of supporting a ton of brilliant young jazz musicians and thie rbands. It’s via one of thoes musicians on social media I discovered London based band Y.

After watching the video of them live at the Lexington below. I really wanna go see them play live. It’s all a big mix of Japanese Jazz fusion, Hardcore punk drums and really angular riffs.

They are apparently part of a much bigger wave of ‘Post Brexit Pop’ i’m here for it. Kinda wanna start another band and make some my self. LOL

Remember Kids:

The post I Watch Bright Things Unfold Themselves appeared first on thejaymo.net.

Easter ’25

I went back down to the chalk on Wednesday last week and spent the time at home with my parents. Really blessed by the weather. It was supped to rain the whole time but it was really nice! The whole time back home was packed. We went to the theatre, I went to the dentist, we went out to dinner, I saw some family, we went to Canterbury and bumped into my Uncle Michael randomly in the high street lol, and also walked round the Cathedral, we visited Walmer Castle (saw Wellingtons Boots) and it’s gardens. Made several trips down the town for coffee, went to church, did some sea wall walks and popped into the Easter food festival.

So now I’m back in London, I’m looking forward to throwing myself back home into the normal routine for rest!

I was going to write a whole thing here this week, I had all the bullet points in my head. I was going to write it on train back from the chalk. But in the event, when I did get on the train back to London today, I sat down at an empty page in my word processor and just typed for an hour and twenty mins. It was just a huge brain dump, writing at the speed of thought. Writing is thinking, and it turned out that I had a whole bunch of thinking to do.

I really wish that this had been explained to me when I was younger. Perhaps it was, but I wasn’t ready to hear it. But I feel so much better for having exloaded a bunch of stuff on to the page. There are a few ideas in there that might become something – maybe not. But they are out of my head now. Once the ideas hit the page, they change shape. Sometimes they evaporate and go nowhere. Other times they calcify into something solid and worth taking further. Most of the time they’re just… dust. But either way, I’ve cleared the decks now.

One of the things I decided returning to the theme of last weeks post is that i’m actually going to drop one of the writing projects I have going and just focus on the one thing until its done. At least to first complete end to end draft anyway. The less there is to split my attention across the better.

That’s the update this week. Had a nice time at home. Did a bunch of thinking on the train No neat conclusions, just a quieter desk and a little more room to think.

On The Blog

AI UX: Pixel Agents, Talking Cars, and Moving Eyes

I wrote about some of the novel agent interfaces I’m seeing emerging.

There’s a meaning crisis going on, which means there is a gaping emotional void waiting to be filled by a good listener that’s found in the safety of a car. Some people, especially men, already love their cars. What happens when the car appears to care for them back?

Her becomes a lot more plausible when the AI you fall in love with is also a car.

Both Doug Belshaw over at Thought Shrapnel, and Patrick Tanguay at Sentiers Newsletter had nice things to say about this post. Click through to see their additions to this conversation.

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Photo 365

The Ministry Of My Own Labour

• Worked on SLOP MACHINES essay
• Worked on WRITING THE IMPOSSIBLE OBJECT essay
• Noodled 2k words into ON MEDITATION
• Updated worldrunning.guide to a new version. Added ‘Leaving Worlds Behind’ and many new items to the glossary
• 9 Hours production work
• 2h consulting calls
• Got given a quest

Terminal Access

Recommend this piece in the New Yorker by Kyle Chayka on Recession Indicators

In a follow-up essay that Lau co-wrote, he argued that the startup boom of the two-thousands created a culture of convenience and an appearance of innovation that has now dwindled: “a generation of youth are experiencing a brutal realization that nobody is coming to rescue them.”

Reading

Warrington Runcorn New Town Development Plan – Overspill Estates

Warrington Runcorn New Town Development Plan has a new EP out. According to the liner notes Overspill Estates contains tracks that for a long time were on last years album Your Community Hub. It’s more ambitious retro futurism. I love it.

Remember Kids:

The post Easter ’25 appeared first on thejaymo.net.

Issue #012 of Start Select Reset just went out via snail mail to supporters subscribed at £5 Monthly  or above

✨ Subscribe now and get Start Select Reset delivered straight to your mailbox 📬 four times a year.

Issue #012 – Long Form Leap x Shadow Boxing

Issue #012 is a double feature, tackling two intertwined creative struggles:

• Shadow Boxing – The exhausting mental habit of preemptively battling imaginary critics online.

• Long Form Leap – My ongoing attempt to write longer, more ambitious essays.

In the first piece, I reflect on how social media has trained us to anticipate judgment before we even act, leading to creative hesitation, diluted ideas, and unfinished projects.

In the second, Long Form Leap, I examine my personal version of that same struggle—breaking past the 8-10k word range in my writing while keeping ideas clear and cohesive.

The fact that these longer essays are destined for print, rather than screen, adds another layer of resistance—my inner critic speaks louder when something feels permanent. If any of this resonates with you—whether you’re battling your own shadow critics or trying to level up your creative work—this issue is for you.

You know, I’ve been making this zine for three years, and it’s only just occurred to me to take a photo of myself holding it against a white background. Looks pretty sweet! Sometimes, the simplest things take the longest to figure out.

Expect more of these kinds of shots going forward—feels like a nice way to mark each release. In a few issues time I’ll make a cool gif.

If you subscribed during the ‘pledge drive’ that kicked off with the last episode of 301 in 2024, you’ll not only receive Issue #12, but also a bonus copy of my most recent solo game, Quiet Quests – Issue #11. Just a little extra something as a bonus.

I still have a few copies left, so if you’ve been thinking about subscribing but haven’t yet, now’s a great time—future issues are shaping up to be something special.

Biggest Print Run Yet!

The mailing list keeps growing, and with every issue, the wedge of envelopes I drop into the postbox gets thicker. Seeing that stack grow is deeply satisfying—finally fulfilling a dream I’ve had since childhood. I’ve been making personal zines since I was 9 or 10, but this is the first time I’ve shipped one at this scale.

This zine, as a personal project, is on track to be the biggest print run per issue I’ve ever done for a zine, and that feels really satisfying.

It’s super cool knowing that these little booklets are making their way out into the world, landing in real hands, in real places.

Your support makes this all possible, blog, podcast, zine etc—thank you all being part of my creative journey.

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The post Start Select Reset Zine #012 | Shadow Boxing x Long Form Leap appeared first on thejaymo.net.

In the Storm, a Fire

A Solarpunk Short Story by Jay Springett + Andrew Dana Hudson

The fire looked recent. The storm must have doused the flames just too late. Chani pulled her bike to a stop, smelling soggy ash, hanging in the breathless air. She could see charred pews, hymnal pages scattered by the wind. A porcelain-white Jesus looked mournfully out of the wreckage.

The Catholic church—was “Catholic” still right?—stood just outside urban Boise. Chani walked around the blackened beams, interrupting the hazy sky like the ribcage of a giant, burnt beast—then stopped short. On the picket fence, graffiti scrawled red and black: “JEZ LOVER” on one side of the gate, “BABY KILLER” on the other.

“On no…” Chani said.

A croak on the air responded: “Help!”

Her nurse’s training kicked in. She stopped rubbernecking and scanned for survivors. Propped up against a gnarled scarf of a tree, she saw the black-clothed slump of a man. 

She rushed to him, taking in the details: bald head, damp black shirt missing its dog collar, two extremely broken legs.

“Father Edward!” Chani cried. She’d expected to meet the old priest today—half the illegal meds in her pack were contraceptives he helped distribute—but not like this.

“Sorry I’m in a state,” he wheezed. “Never should’ve let those Juniper Boys in.”

“Who?” But Chani already knew the answer. “Fash?”

Father Edward nodded. “Jared Pine’s thugs. Enviro-Christian fundamentalists, or so they call themselves. ‘Stewards of holy asperity.’” Father Edward seemed keen to gush his story. “Should’ve guessed those shirts were more brown than green.” 

“Who’s Jared Pine?” Chani began to run through the basic first aid checks she’d learned. She wanted to keep him talking. “He named his posse ‘the Juniper Boys’? Yikes.”

“Snapchat demagogue. Before your time.” Father Edward coughed. “I think he was a real player in state politics once, but the AmNats overtook his ambitions. I guess he’s been playing at the edges of the militias and PVP scenes ever since.”

“And he just showed up?”

“Some people called wanting to rent the sanctuary for meetings, asked me to let them in late. When they arrived Pine was with them, and…well, someone had told him about the pills.”

Chani spared a glance at her pack. “That’s very bad,” she said.

“You know, last month Frannie lectured me about op-sec, but I said, ‘It’s a church. Even with the schism, we have to have a little faith in people.’ Serves me right.”

Chani gave him water and considered her options. He was tough to have survived the battering storm. She visualized the coded order sheet for the pharmaceuticals hidden in the jars of fruit preserves in her backpack: drugs for cancer, AIDS, Alzheimer’s. Birth control pills. No pain killers—Frannie, her boss, refused to do opiates.

If she got him home to Greenwood, out in the burbs, folks at Frannie’s lab could probably set his legs right. But moving him herself seemed like a bad idea, even if she could carry him on her bike.

The other option was a hospital in Boise.

“Do you have insurance?” she asked. “We have to call an ambulance.”

“The diocese will pay…I think.” His voice was breaking again. “Would have hailed one myself, but…my arms.”

Along with the legs, both Edward’s shoulders were dislocated. His hands sat rag doll in his lap. Chani could call an ambulance through her own interface, but doing so would leave a record that would put the lab at risk. Instead she delicately felt his pockets, tugged out and unrolled a black wafer of glass. The phone was locked with a gesture print code.

“You have to do it,” she said. “They can’t know I was here. Which means you need to open your phone. Which means, unless you have another way, I’m going to have to pop your arms back in. Okay?”

She used that authoritative nurse’s voice, full of no-nonsense compassion. Edward grimaced, then nodded.

With her dad’s pocket knife, Chani sliced off the priest’s black clergy shirt. No cuts or bruising on the chest. These injuries were meant to be painful, not permanent—the kind of cruelty the gangs inflicted, knowing police would ignore anyone merely ‘roughed up.’

“One thing you should know,” Edward said as Chani rolled a strip of his shirt for him to bite down on. “They asked where I got the pills, my supplier. It’s pretty hazy—I was passing out after the second leg—but…I think I told them.”

“Also very bad,” Chani said. “But one thing at a time.”

She knelt by his right shoulder. She had only done this before on practice dummies. She muttered the instructions she’d memorized.

“On three,” she said. “One. Two—”

She felt the ball of the humerus snap into the shoulder socket. Edward screamed into the gag.

The other arm was harder. After two tries Edward spit out the gag and panted. They were both dripping with sweat. She got it on the third attempt. Edward’s shout rippled through the still air.

The adrenaline of doing crash medicine had made time slow down. Now it raced past her. The next few minutes were a blur. Edward wincingly opened his phone and dialed 911. As he pleaded with the glitchy, unsympathetic voice of Alexa, a man appeared—a neighbor, summoned by the priest’s hollering. Chani was suspicious that he chose this moment to investigate, and not while the church was burning, nor while Edward called for help through the night. But he carried a rifle, and his presence, looming and stone-faced, made Chani flinch on her plan to bug out before the ambulance arrived.

Then the medi-cops were there, in their black tactical vests. They loaded Father Edward—his eyes apologetic—into the ambulance, took Chani’s citizen number and statement. She lied through her teeth about why she was there, but her cover seemed to pass. They scanned her bike interface and left.

Chani desperately wanted to flee home, tell Frannie about the hole blown in their operation, but she knew one of the specks in the sky had to be a police drone, floated over to watch her movements. Acting spooked might connect the dots for the cops, if they shared Pine’s intel. And besides, the pills were too precious to waste—at the very least she needed to hand them off to someone they could trust.

So, with no better options, she got back on the bike and pedaled on to her next stop. The sun blazed. She was suddenly exhausted. She blinked on her share bike’s assist motor, paying the nominal fee to use the power she’d stored up with her sweat.

She wound back to the riparian greenway, with its intact bike path. It was cooler there, even as the morning got hot; the dappled sunlight dancing across the bike path, surreally calm after the crisis at the church. Then the interface in her vision informed her that her share bike was logging her onto the city grid, and she was instantly overwhelmed by advertising. Her earbuds blared. The scratched display-skin on her bike crawled with photos of the latest cycling styles. Her contacts clicked over too, and transparent ghost cyclists streamed by on brand new fab designs. The experience was finely tuned to make her feel bad about the corporate clunker she was on.

Chani immediately paid the fee for a few hours of visual respite, and was left with only occasional flickers of propaganda, which she couldn’t opt out of: slogans and memes mapped onto the trees. “Withdrawal: A More Moral Freedom,” one said. “Asperity Preserves America for a New Generation,” said another. Chani gave the ghost-signs the finger.

The lush, old greenbelt blurred into a grid of tree-and-high-grass monoculture: asperity rewilding, or fash-forest as Frannie called it. She lost more time walking her bike around spots where saplings had been ripped from the thin soil of broken urbanite by the previous night’s storm. “I don’t know how you kids just shake those things off,” Frannie had said that morning when Chani had rolled in, sopping from the last of the rain.

She crossed the Boise River, fragrant with stormwater, and took Fairview downtown. The capitol loomed, bedecked with “Our Idaho” banners and the 44-starred flag. At the farmer’s market, young, happy, white people shuffled from shops to restaurants. It was that bubble of normalcy fascism preserved. Construction cranes raised luxury condos, power-hungry vertical farms, and solar arrays to power both. “Everything is pregnant with its opposite,” Chani recalled Frannie saying, and so the ‘harsh conditions’ demanded by asperity of course implied great ease and comfort for a favored class.

She wheeled through the lively crowds, passing perfect stalls selling ‘perfect’ foods, state-curated to the ecological tastes of the upper class: C4-pathway grains and ‘unwasteable’ gene-edited fruit. Chani found her contact at a booth selling cheese and honey.

“Chani! I was worried I wasn’t going to see you today,” Kayla said. She was a middle-aged millennial, but, with dyed black hair and meticulous makeup, she passed for 30. This wasn’t vanity, Chani knew, but self-preservation. Asperity was unkind to the elderly.

“Hectic morning, you know how it is,” Chani said. She opened her pack of jars, pulled out a stack of pickled plums hiding drugs that kept Alzheimer’s at bay. Kayla’s face lit up with gratitude.

“Folks are really going to appreciate these,” Kayla said. “My mother especially. I know she’s been running low.”

“Kayla, listen. I have extra today, of some, uh, different varieties,” Chani said carefully. Around them the market bustled. “Would you want to take them off my hands? Free of charge, of course.”

Kayla’s eyes flickered.

“That’s mighty kind of you, but my customers are quite particular.” Kayla could tell something was wrong, Chani saw, and wasn’t going to risk carrying the Schedule 1 contraceptive pills. Kayla scanned the market again. “George at the peanut shop enjoys all sorts of fruit.”

Frannie would kill her for dropping the pills with an unknown, unvetted contact, but Chani didn’t see a better option. She knew the place, a couple of blocks away. She pedalled out of the market, picking up speed.

Rounding a corner, Chani felt her bike shudder. The wheels seized up, and she lurched over the handlebars. Her backpack crunched on the pavement.

Chani groaned. Pedestrians stepped forward to help, and then quickly shrunk back. Her bike’s display skin was flashing red and blue. Then her earbuds blared with sirens. Her vision swirled and went black. All she could see was blinding white text: STAY WHERE YOU ARE.

This was the last thing Chani wanted to do. She clawed the contacts out of her eyes, flicked them into the sweet syrup bleeding from her canvass pack. Protein-printed, they would melt away to nothing. She pulled out her earbuds, flung them away. They were pumping clattering noises designed to dizzy and disorient, still audible from yards away. Chani tried to find her feet, and for a moment confronted the world blissfully unaugmented. But it was too late to run. 

The pedestrians she’d seen moments ago had magically disappeared. Instead, three young men in off-green shirts were walking towards her. An older man stood behind her, grinning as he blocked her exit with a stick. Something about his flat face was familiar.

The first jackboot came down on her wrist, and she collapsed on the porous pavement. Several more blows struck her legs and thighs. Unsure where the men were, she curled into a ball, protecting her major organs. She heard shouting, the clink of broken glass, and then the beating stopped. More footsteps and now low voices. She lay still for a while, since that seemed to be working, taking long, painful breaths until she heard the hum of an electric vehicle pulling away. She looked up.

The silhouettes of two men were peering down at her. They wore all black—cops. Chani wondered: had they really arrived just after her beating, or had they simply sat back and watched?

In the back of the police cruiser a shitty virtual assistant barked out her rights though speakers in the partition. She was being held under “social questioning,” which meant she had no rights, but, the voice assured her, she wasn’t under arrest. Her detainment would have no effect on her citizenship score—though what she said and did while detained might. The plastic seats burned from baking in the sun. She ached from the kicking, and her wrist was ballooning to the size of a grapefruit. She flexed and rolled her hand inside the handcuffs. Not broken, just extremely messed up. The cuffs sensed her movement and squeezed back.

The booking office ran with fine-tuned bureaucratic efficiency. Everyone wore headsets, the station’s commanding intelligence issuing micro-task after micro-task. Nobody here thought for themselves. She was processed by a young lady with a long hash number tattooed on her arm—a party member as well as a cop. Chani tried to control her breathing, kept her responses short. She focused on the numbers, reflecting on the sheer historical audacity of this memetic co-option. This stupid woman wore her dehumanization on her skin as a point of pride.

“Your shirt, now in police custody, contains fibers that are non-recyclable. Under Green Fund Code 4.29 Subsection C, it will be sent to the municipal plant for secure digestion.”

Chani winced. It was an old shirt, twenty-teens maybe, but its technical fabrics were of the highest quality: anti-odor, anti-rip, fireproof, though she’d never tested it. Even a lifetime guarantee. It had been her father’s, and he’d retailored it for her sixteenth birthday, two months before he’d been camped. But those unfortunate enough to have contact with the police, particularly poor people, were not allowed to have nice things.

Her handcuffs clicked open, and she was directed to strip where she stood in the plastic processing booth. She was given the same standard-issue grey clothes that came in the U.N. Met Needs boxes that USAID spread everywhere to mollify the refugee millions. Then she sat alone waiting for questioning. The room was air conditioned, and goosebumps pickled her forearms. It was refreshing, she had to admit. Maybe the AC was the good cop.

The cop who came to interrogate her had no party tattoos, but wore a party pin on his lapel. ‘Flare,’ Frannie called it.

“Chester isn’t it?” the cop said. Chani scoffed. That wasn’t even her deadname. He just wanted her off balance. Chani waited for the other shoe to drop, and sure enough the cop performatively checked his tablet. “My mistake. Chani. That was decent work you did with the priest. Med team say you relocated both his shoulders very cleanly. That’s an expensive procedure, lot of liability if it goes wrong. Not sure I would’ve had the guts to try that at your age. Or the know-how.”

“I did some nurse’s training after high school,” Chani said. Hiding it seemed pointless. Better to save her lies for when they were absolutely necessary.

“Really…” The cop drew out the word. “You don’t have any certifications. You know, it’s important that the nation know what its citizens can contribute. Are you finding ways to make your training useful up in—where do you live again?”

“Eagle.”

“Right, Eagle. You know I heard you people have a less patriotic nickname for it. What do you call it again?”

“Greenwood.” This patronizing ritual was exhausting. It was probably meant to be. 

Greenwood wasn’t like the other suburbs. It had been one of the first communities to downshift in the early 20’s, densifying housing and filling empty lots with open orchards and perennial food production. And when the fash won the Federal, it had retained some autonomy: building infrastructure of resistance, cutting off the infrastructure of control. Chani’s dad had moved them a thousand miles to be there when she was little. Getting out of the country had been dangerous, then—still was. Better to be dug in, he’d decided, and Greenwood was where he’d found to dig. 

“Right. That’s a long bike ride to downtown. That church isn’t exactly on your way. Why were you visiting Father Edward?”

“Just saying hi. It’s a good place to stop and cool off on my rides.”

“That’s funny. I just talked to him. He said he didn’t know you.”

Fucking prisoner’s dilemma bullshit. There hadn’t been a chance to get their stories straight. She didn’t say anything.

“Are you sure there wasn’t any other reason you were at the church?”

“I’m sure. Shouldn’t you be after the people who burned the place down?”

She had hoped to distract her interrogator, but instead he looked pleased.

“Mr. Pine already came in himself and cleared up that misunderstanding. Bit of a theological dispute with your Jesuit pal there, which unfortunately got out of hand. Then the big storm, a lightning strike. Unlucky coincidence. Not the kind of thing we usually like to insert ourselves into, especially since they were leveling some pretty serious accusations. Distributing illegal drugs out of a church. Would you know anything about that?”

“Nope,” Chani said. She was boiling inside. The fash and the cops: twin bodies of social violence, orbiting around each other, never touching but always in sync.

“So where are the drugs, Chani?” The cop was mild.

“I don’t know,” Chani said. Technically true, in case they had some kind of polygraph camera in the walls, like in cop shows. Then she wondered if those cameras could pick up on thoughts like ‘technically true’.

The cop set a baggie on the table. Some of the contraceptive pills from her pack, Chani guessed. A little token of evidence from the Juniper Boys to excuse their crimes at the church, while they kept the rest of what they stole for themselves. Jared Pine probably had mistresses he didn’t want getting knocked up. Frannie always said the biggest moralizers were the biggest hypocrites.

“What do you think we’ll find when we examine your bike’s location history?” the cop asked. That stupid piece of rolling malware. She thought of the cops moving on Greenwood, tracing her steps back to Frannie.

The cop sensed her weakness and softened to win her over.

“Look,” he said. “We don’t care about a runner. We want the source. We have to get this DIY junk off the streets. It’s not safe for people and you know it.”

He waited through more of her silence.

“Why don’t we get that hand looked at?” he pressed. “Pro bono. You can see the difference a real hospital makes, maybe think over getting that nursing credential.”

Her wrist throbbed. Chani hated everything about this situation, but she wasn’t going to turn down his offer.

The hospital was clean and shiny, of course, with calming murals and luxurious furniture. No wait, since few could afford to be there. A doctor looked over her bruises, wrapped her wrist, gave her a pain killer, which she pocketed. Then she was left to stew.

Chani thought of the first time she ran meds for Frannie. “The stuff we make isn’t what they deserve,” the old woman had said. “They deserve to go to a real hospital, with drugs that work without costing a mortgage payment. Instead they’ll take crap we cook with bike parts and printers because it’s better than getting broke, dead or pregnant.”

Chani remembered going to a ‘real hospital’ when she was little, but not since. Hospitals were for people with insurance, and insurance was for people with corporate jobs, who didn’t mind living in the spotlight of fascist health surveillance. The nursing classes she’d taken after high school had been more concerned with channeling useful people into the military or militias—not an experience of education.
So with morbid interest Chani wandered around the hospital. The halls and rooms had cameras; the exits were controlled by guards. There was no reason to lock her down. Nurses smiled thinly at her as they bustled by. Healthcare was a means by which the state extracted compliance from the disobedient, so the staff was probably used to seeing people in her predicament.

In a room looking out on Military Reserve Park, she found the priest. He reclined on a plastic-wrapped mattress, legs suspended in blocks of grainy gelatin. His black clothes were piled in tatters on the nightstand. His wrists were zip-tied to the bed frame.

It occurred to Chani that they were probably being recorded, that the cops were letting her roam precisely to hear what she or Father Edward might let slip if they talked again. Still, she stepped into the room.

“Legs look set. How are the shoulders?”

“Sore.” Edward took in her gray clothes, the compression webbing on her wrist. “I’m sorry you got caught up in this.”

“Well, I’m sorry Jared Pine burned down your church,” Chani said. She did feel a bit guilty, since she’d been the one bringing him the contraceptive pills. “And about the bills from this, and everything.”

“God works in mysterious ways, probably,” Edward chuckled. Chani wondered what pain killers they’d put him on. “Anyhow, don’t worry about me. The diocese crowdfunds have already started collecting. You should watch out for yourself, being so off the grid. Knowing your neighbors is good, but when you get in trouble away from home it’s better if a big network has your back.”

“Cops said Pine blamed the fire on a lightning strike,” Chani said. “Are they really going to let him off?”

Edward sighed. “I think this is all a game to Pine. He’s of that middle generation that had no sense of progress and no emergency to face, so it’s just culture war all the way down, with no rules and no stakes. Not the worst kind of fascist, but maybe the cruelest. I remember how he postured in front of his young followers. I told him he’d need to find a new bit soon. It wouldn’t work out for him, getting old while preaching about generational vengeance, the coming American youth state. That’s when he had them do this to me.”

Chani remembered the priest’s twisted legs and the black bones of his church, both left out in the rain.

“Seems like more than a ‘theological dispute’ then,” she said. “Didn’t realize Cath politics got so violent.”

“You’d be surprised,” Edward said. “You might be too young to remember, but dozens died after the Boston Edict. It’s never good to have two popes. It always means war. Now we have—what?—four, at least? In Europe, it’s simpler; the divides are old and understood. And the Southern Churches are united in going their own way. But here, it’s messy. For people like Pine, the Jesuit Pope’s dying encyclical on reproductive justice was just an excuse to turn on fellows they’d always considered apostates.” Edward shifted to look at her, winced. “Catholicism is supposed to mean universal, but now it’s just another crux of resentment. The middle class, forever eating self.” 

“‘Fascism with American Characteristics,’” Chani quoted, wryly. Then, with no more politics to dissect, she felt the great, dull sorrow, always thumping beneath her survival-cynicism. “On the bright side, I hear the camps are big on uniting families. Collect the whole set, you know? So maybe I’ll see my dad.”

Father Edward flexed out the fingers on his bound hand, and Chani, not knowing what else to do, took it in her own. He looked her dead in the eyes. 

“Christ has no body but yours. No hands, no feet on Earth but yours. Yours are the eyes with which he looks compassion on this world.”

Chani didn’t know what to make of that, but somehow she felt buoyed.

She stayed with the priest a while. He prayed, she listened. Eventually a nurse poked in. “You’re wanted in the lobby,” she said. The polite phrasing struck Chani as funny. As if she had a choice in the matter.

Two new cops waited for her, hands resting on holstered tasers. Without a word they gripped her upper arms and marched her to the exit. Chani stumbled along, feeling the full weight of the day’s catastrophe. Was she about to get indentured until she cooperated? If she did cooperate, wouldn’t that just get her friends camped as well? She hated the idea of the brilliant permaculturists of Greenwood spending their days planting fash-forest on some superfund site.

Out the door, into sickening afternoon heat. Chani looked around for the police car but didn’t see one. Then the grips on her arms tightened, and she was shoved forward, towards a big van covered in cheap, scratched solar panels. The van’s back doors opened, and Chani sprawled inside, rolling painfully as the vehicle peeled away from the curb.

“You ever heard of the Church Fire Problem, child?”

Now Chani recognized the grinning man from the street as Jared Pine. Her dad had made her watch documentaries on the culture wars, and Pine’s flat, angry face had appeared more than once. Now he sat on the van’s unpadded bench, thinner, graying, skin leathered, but basically the same young man who’d screamed into his bedroom webcam about “Christ, Land, and Young Blood.” He held his cedar wood stick like a long truncheon and rapped her spine to force her deeper into the van.

Chani glared at him. She’d been beat up, bounced around by a system that gave her no agency. She was scared for Frannie, for Greenwood, for the people who needed the medicine she’d meant to deliver. Maybe they were getting arrested right now. And all of it was Jared Pine’s fault.

“Fuck you!” she exploded. “You fash garbage! What now? Going to have someone beat me up again? Fuck. You.”

Pine smiled with the edges of his mouth. He leaned back and buckled his seatbelt. Then he tapped twice on the driver’s partition with the end of his stick.

The van lurched, and Chani slammed into the bench. The driver cut the wheel the other way, and she crashed hard into the opposite side. Then the van’s brakes locked, and Chani rolled, forehead smacking the plexiglas partition.

She groaned, eyes watering from the pain. Pine tapped the partition again, and the swerving stopped.

“Not very talkative now are you? Just a moment ago you were effing and blinding. I wonder which toxic half you get that from, huh? Sit.” 

Chani sullenly took a seat on the bench opposite him.

“The Church Fire Problem,” he repeated, biting out each word. “Once upon a time churches burned down a lot. Not on purpose, mind you, but because they were tall wooden buildings filled with candles, cloth and paper. Flammable as an oil drum, whoosh! But when a church burned down, the community would rally around and rebuild it. And more importantly, they rebuilt to fit the needs of the congregation.”

Pine talked with the broken cadence of someone used to getting recorded and edited. Chani didn’t want to hear the sermon, but letting him talk let her catch her breath, comprehend her surroundings. The back of the van was an empty metal box. Nothing but the benches and the single seatbelt for Pine, guarding the rear doors with his stick.

“Then people stop going to church,” Pine continued. “Decadence and concrete spread over the land. Church people start to ask themselves, what’s causing the decline in attendance? Theory I like is: modern churches had fire suppression systems. They didn’t burn down, and as a result they were never rebuilt, never right-sized to fit the new generation. After decades the buildings would be too big or too small, full of useless rooms that didn’t match the new spirit of the church. They clung to the old and resisted the renewal that nature and fire intended for all things.”

“And you’re the lightning storm, here to correct that arrogance?” Chani said. Fash were so predictable, making the same mistakes every time, like confusing buildings with real human lives.

Pine grinned wider. “Funny, isn’t it? How we get swept up in the narrative of history? Both our communities sit at a crossroads for this place. The current and future history of Our Idaho.”

Chani hated that stupid Our Idaho bullshit. She grimaced. It was sweltering in the metal van. Guess the Juniper boys objected to AC. Pine was sweating too.

“Can we get some air?” she asked.

Pine seemed to enjoy this apparent confirmation of her weakness, and so called to the driver, “Simon! Windows down.” A slight breeze began to brush through the little holes in the partition—still hot, but fresh.

“We both know the decadent generation built the world wrong,” Pine continued, “but seems to me you Greenwood folks lack the conviction to burn it down. ‘Sprawl repair’ —come on! Torch the house yourself, or risk being inside when the torches come.”

Then Chani smelled it: the Boise River, wafting in through the window. She knew it from a hundred bike rides through the greenway. They were getting close.

“You sure your wrinkled body isn’t the old house?” Chani asked, forcing her own malicious grin. “Got enough ‘young blood’ in there to be worth the carbon you exhale? When do you become ‘liability class’?”

“You’ve been talking to that traitor priest,” Pine said, grin gone, face red. “You’re the liability here. Police marched on Greenwood this afternoon, because of you. Thing is, they don’t know what they’re looking for, and I do. So when the cops are done, you and me are gonna go have a chat with my old pal Frannie.” 

This made no sense to Chani, but he was getting riled, and that’s what she needed. “Admit it, these boys will get bored of you soon,” she pressed, the scent of rushing water in her nostrils. “They’ll lock you in a nursing home right before they burn it down.” Then she called to the driver: “Won’t you, Simon?”

Pine raised his stick and thumped on the partition. This time, however, Chani was ready for him. She lunged forward and clicked open his seat belt. Then she braced herself as the van swerved. Pine flailed out of his seat, crashing to the floor. The van cut again, and Chani gripped the rear door handle. Just like last time the driver slammed on the breaks, and Pine rolled forward, stick clattering out of his hand. Chani shoved open the doors and leapt.

She stumbled, then fell onto the pavement in a rolling sprawl. They were on a bridge, almost to one side. Chani hopped the railing and flung herself down the embankment, rolling again. She found her feet in the river shallows. New evening bruises layered atop afternoon bruises, but nothing was broken.

She waded across the river and ran west. She heard shouting and the whine of the solar van reversing. She imagined Pine looking out the van, trying to figure out how to get down after her. But it was already too late: she was in the trees. The wild was adversary to both, but now it was between them. 

The forest scratched and snapped at her. She worried about poison ivy. Bugs flew up her nose. The day’s muggy heat had penetrated the canopy. She imagined the greenhouse firmament far above pressing closer than ever, thick with wasted breath and the ashes of dead monsters. Causing so much trouble. Or else, an excuse for trouble. She’d never know which.

Eventually she trudged out of the greenway and into the suburbs, now a patchwork of rewilding, semi-abandoned lots, sporadic well-kept lawns. Big chunks of stamped-out sprawl had been torn down. Some lots were farmed behind tall, razorwire fences. Not like home.

Federal land reapportionment had once applied eminent domain to environmentally mismanaged private lands. The asperity government used this scalpel, designed to fight wealthy landholders, as a hammer to dispossess anyone local power brokers or dox-mobs wanted out of the way. People still lived among the burnt out suburban bones—just not black or brown people like Chani, nor queer people like Chani, nor anyone else the fashions of right-wing paranoia turned against.

She heard a rumble, and she crouched in the weeds as a dozen black-booted cops passed on quad bikes and tactical scooters, headed back to Boise in a tight line. A show of force, no doubt returning from Greenwood. She wondered if seeing them now was good or bad.

She walked on, to a familiar hill, hiked up. Propaganda signs had been set up on the top, pointedly facing Greenwood: “Pure Soil, Pure Sky, Pure Idaho” and “Resist the Great Replacement.” Rust marked the boundary between sprawlrot and retrosurbubia; the storm had whipped flecks of red metal off the billboard struts, dotting brownfields on one side, fruit bushes and rows of leafy greens on the other.

Just like that, she was home. She marveled at how little she felt at this fact. The streets were empty—not surprising, given the police had recently passed. She trudged down the boardwalk, mechanically picked a plum from a roadside damson tree. Had she eaten anything all day?

The lab was under a repaired big box store that now served as an artisan commons. When she got there Chani found commotion. The place looked trashed: windows shot out, tools and goods strewn outside the entrance. Inside, Frannie’s technicians were performing first aid on half a dozen cop-beaten artisans. Chani walked up to Frannie who was debating with her assistant whether a solar panel, flung from the roof, could be salvaged.

“‘Sun’s not free,’ one of them actually told me. Can you believe those pigs?” Frannie said. Then, seeing Chani, “Holy shit.”

Chani burst into tears then, and old, hefty Frannie took her in a bear hug. She sobbed, understanding nothing but the petting of her hair. Some minutes later someone passed her a burrito. Chani sat in the grass and ate. New contacts were found and Chani’s vision gushed with frantic messages backed up over the day. Then they hustled down to the DIY lab, concealed in a bunker the big box had built for management to hide out during labor unrest. In the white noise privacy of humming centrifuges and grow lights, improvised chemistry sets and pill-packing rigs, Chani spilled her story in one long, tangled sentence.

“Ja-red-fuck-ing-Pine,” Frannie spat. “You know I once had to debate that asshole, when I ran for governor. Back when we were trying to be civil.” She laughed.

“He called you ‘old pal,’ Fran,” Chani said. “Got the feeling this is some kind of grudge for him. And I was what? A bargaining piece?”

“The year I got the dem-soc nomination, Pine tried to run on his side too. Thought his selfie stick was the only campaign he needed. I didn’t win, but I made damn sure he didn’t either. We heckled each other online for years after, until things went to shit.” Frannie sighed. “The Juniper Boys are mean as hell, but they aren’t an army. And Pine, he’s the kind of dumb the establishment likes to keep around, which means the cops do most of his dirty work. They didn’t find shit though, this time, so I expect Pine will be along soon. Suppose we better go talk to him.”

“Talk to him?” Chani was livid. “He kidnapped me! I’d rather, I dunno…eliminate him!”

“You think we can just shoot a minor fash religious celeb dead in the street?” Frannie pointed at the ceiling. “Cop balloons are watching our every move today. That means we can’t make much noise, and we definitely can’t make bodies. The state still finds deaths it didn’t approve bureaucratically inconvenient.”

Chani waved around the lab. “We also can’t keep this going with Pine trying to jump every delivery we send out. So, what, we’re supposed to pay him off? Befriend him? Fuck that!”

Frannie said nothing. Instead she just hobbled towards the stairs, not looking back. Chani followed.

A straggle of Greenwood folks gathered atop the hill at the edge of the neighborhood. The low sun still burned, but Chani felt a cooler, ozone-tweaked wind whip up from the river. After everything, was another storm coming?

Lights on the road below. Three vans pulled up. White men in identical haircuts poured out. They brandished torches and gas cans. Chani wondered what corrupt dispensation let the Juniper Boys waste restricted carbon fuels on arson.

Pine got out and hoofed it up the hill. He had his stick but was working hard not to use it.

“Frannie-fran!” Pine called. “When I heard someone was bootlegging slut pills, I just knew! Been enjoying playing doctor with your little nurse there?”

“What do you want, Jared?” Frannie called back. They stood only paces apart, but each was putting on a show for the two crowds.

“You know, it’s a real shame you dropped off the feeds,” Pine said. “I used to enjoy your little commie rants. Bet you never imagined we’d end up here. You a fake pharmacist and me,” he raised his staff like Moses, “a prophet.”

“Yeah, your fanboys down there are real divine-sent mascots of asperity. Those fine, fibershed shirts, fronting like they want to raze our fields,” Frannie said. “Thing is, lot of people in Greenwood already got fucked over by the cops today. Wouldn’t surprise me if some of them were spoiling for a fairer fight.” The crowd of artisans and lab techs murmured agreement. “So what, exactly, do you want?”

“Let’s just say we’re looking to diversify our activities.” Pine grinned. “And seems like you might be needing a new distributor.”

Chani’s blood boiled. The sectarian violence, the incoherent eco-ideology—none of it had meant anything. Everything was still about money.

“Why would you want to work with me, Jared?” Frannie said. “You know I fucking hate you.”

“I got growing boys to feed,” Pine said, his voice not as loud. He was serious, Chani realized. The priest had been right: Pine’s position was precarious. “Plus, I like the idea of spoiling your perfect lefty commune here. You probably think Greenwood is that paradise-built-in-hell nonsense. But at best it’s just another temporary autonomous zone, emphasis on the temporary. And when it falls apart, I want to be there to drop a match on the tinder you leave behind.”

“There you go again, pretending to believe in something other than your own ego,” Frannie said. Then she walked up to Pine and punched him in the nose.

There was a collective gasp as Pine went down. No one had ever seen the old woman move that fast. The Greenwood crowd shifted forward a step. Down the hill torches flared and wavered.

“Just like the good old days,” Frannie said, rubbing her hand. She leaned over Pine. “Listen, you know why we call it ‘Greenwood’? Because green wood is hard to fucking burn. No, don’t get up. I get it. Your coin is slipping from favor, and those party member condos don’t come cheap. Well, tell you what. We can help each other after all. You deliver my meds, and I’ll be generous with your cut. But I decide what we sell and to whom, and your boys report to Chani there. And when they come up here, they’re going to do permaculture work, too. Put their hands in the dirt and learn how to grow something better than fash forest. If you’re lucky, we’ll gracefully dismantle your gang before they kill you, me, and everyone else with a spot of grey. But, last catch, you gotta shake my hand first, from right down there in the dirt.”

Pine’s eyes swelled with hate but, also, calculation. He shook.

The sun went down. The propaganda billboards blurred into the twilight. Pine limped away, leaning on his stick, hand covering his bleeding nose. The Juniper boys folded themselves back inside their vans and left.

“The hell was that?” Chani asked, as the whole group followed Frannie back down the hill.

“I dunno, some prison yard bullshit I decided to try,” Frannie said. “Predators don’t do well when you get off their script. Also I promoted you. Hope that’s okay.”

“Sure, put a queer, brown girl in charge of a violent, fascist gang. What could go wrong?”

“Yes, we’re dealing with the devil,” Frannie said, “but the devil is looking for a career change. Stagnant ideology always gives way to crime and grift. Let Pine’s gang become an actual gang-gang. Planting trees and selling drugs is better than planting trees and burning down churches. That’s something we can manage.”

“We’re ‘managing’ fash now?” Chani boiled, even amidst the weird triumph over Pine.

Frannie stopped, took Chani by the shoulders. “Our enemies are in city hall. Our enemies are in the capitol, and the White House, and all in between. The state can always crush us. We only stay safe by keeping them not quite motivated to do so. And that means having allies, and footholds, and a little bit of power. We bought time today, and that’s always what we need.”

Since she’d come upon that blacked church, Chani had been flung from frying pan to frying pan. She wanted desperately to be done, but instead it just kept lurching along. A tower in a storm, burning down over and over.

“Fran, what are we doing? Greenwood is one thing, but this world—how are we supposed to live here?”

Frannie started moving again. “Witness, comprehend, inhabit.”

“Put that on one of those billboards,” Chani said, a last spat of sarcasm. Frannie ignored her, just kept walking.

Chani wasn’t sure she understood the old woman yet. Another day, she would try. She slumped against Frannie and walked home. Clouds moved in and opened. This rain was just a drizzle. It washed off the sweat of the long day.

The post In the Storm, a Fire | A Solarpunk Short Story appeared first on thejaymo.net.

November 17, 2024

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AI 🤖 | Permanently Moved 🔊 | Software 👨‍💻 | Writing ⌨️

In 1984, author Ray Hammond reminded readers that ‘the computer has no power to write words.’

As large language models (LLMs) reshape writing today, it’s worth reflecting on the last seismic shift in creative technology: the rise of the word processor.

Full Show Notes: https://thejaymo.net/2024/11/17/2429-the-processing-of-words/

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The Processing of Words

I have come to a realisation: I am not a writer.

I have friends who are – creative craftsmen with a natural affinity for narrative, or the shape of arguments. They know how to let words flow one after another, forming a coherent whole. 

My writing on the other hand happens in the edit. I don’t write words I process them. Battering at them like a lump of clay. Cut, Copy, Paste, Highlight, Delete, Overwrite, Move, Drag, and Drop.

Words are a medium, to be processed.

I’ve come to this conclusion after reading Track Changes: A Literary History of Word Processing by Matthew G. Kirschenbaum. It’s an amazing book about the creation and adoption of word processing. A technology that has profoundly reshaped not just how we write, but the structure of our own thoughts. As we face a new revolution in literary technologies with LLMs, learning more about earlier revolution felt pressing.

I was born in 1985. I first encountered word processing software at school when I was about nine or ten. For me, and anyone younger, it’s hard to grasp how revolutionary the adoption of word processors was. We take it for granted that words are fluid behind polished glass. But for those who lived through it, followed immediately by the advent of the Internet, the impact was monumental. 

Until reading Track Changes, I hadn’t realised the sheer hostility word processors faced—especially from the creative class. There was outright vitriol. Processing was for vegetables not words went one refrain. Some writers even hid their use of word processors to avoid suspicions of automation or inauthenticity.

In 1984 Alan Hollinghurst, deputy editor of the Times Literary Supplement, worried that “style deteriorates … people write more laxly”. Others dismissed word processors as inefficient or even harmful tools.

A 1982 Writer’s Digest feature on writing novels with computers triggered an avalanche of angry letters. “Typing made easy with personal computers, not writing,” one person fumed.

Meanwhile, sci-fi writers like John Varley joked about using only “natural ingredients” like typewriters and creativity, while evangelists declared word processors as revolutionary as the printing press. Looking back, those hypebeasts were onto something—our lives today revolve around processed words.

One concern at the time was that people might mistake draft-quality work as finished, given the polished look of typeset text. Iris Murdoch lamented that staring at a glowing screen separated writers from their thoughts, giving them a “premature air of completeness.”

The history of word processing is tightly entwined with management consulting and workplace misogyny. The early word processors of the 1970’s were marketed as business tools, not creative ones.

IBM’s marketing team coined the term ‘word processor’ to describe the function of its new machines. But the concept quickly became tied to a reductive view of secretarial labour. 

‘Mad Men style’ management consultants in the late 1970’s pushed hard to dehumanise the secretarial role. Arguing that typing should be a mechanical input-output activity done by a type of worker, rather than individual secretaries who – shock horror, might have opinions and advice after working so closely alongside male executives in the workplace.

The original word processors were women behind typewriters. 

It’s disturbing to read how consultants actively worked to strip secretaries of their agency and autonomy in the workplace, seeing their work as something to measured by word count, accuracy and typing speed. Moving them out of the bosses office and into soul destroying typing pools.

Some fears about word processors, though, have come true.

In the 1984 the author Ray Hammond found it necessary to remind his readers that “the computer has no power to write words.” Many authors feared that readers would not understand the technology and instead would think the computer had ‘written the book for them’. 

The invention of the word processor didn’t just change how writers think in text. It also shifted the labour of writing and publishing. Authors in the 1950s hammered out their manuscripts on typewriters, and sent it off, leaving the task of correcting grammar and spelling to literal copy editors. People who copied the first draft into a cleaned up text.

Word processors mostly pushed those tasks back onto the authors themselves. 

By the late-1990s, most objections to word processors had subsided. Personal computers became the default tool. But it’s worth noting, that word processors were never designed for creative writers – they were business tools first and foremost. We still call them documents. It wasn’t until a later generation of software—like Scrivener—that word processing became more attuned to the needs of writers. And we still lack true hypertext first writing software.

I suspect we’ll see a similar evolution with LLMs. Right now things are being built for business, with a huge push to replace workers. But eventually we’ll get new creative interfaces, new tools, and eventually, new norms about how we think about the production of creative work.

Before anyone objects, it’s worth noting there was also a backlash in the 90’s against tools like spell check and grammar suggestions – tools that are now seen as essential.

Lastly, on a somewhat related note: I recently showed a retired boomer Stable Diffusion. It was their first time seeing image generation in action. They shrugged and said they assumed that’s what people using Photoshop had been doing for the last 20 years. lol

Maybe the fears of the past weren’t so unfounded after all. Or maybe, like before, we’ll adapt, evolve, and thrive in this new era of creative tools.

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The post The Processing of Words | 2429 appeared first on thejaymo.net.

July 21, 2024

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Permanently Moved 🔊 | Writing ⌨️

Ivan, lost in the chaos of modern life, takes a walk by the river seeking solace. A modern fairy story.

Full Show Notes: https://thejaymo.net/2024/07/21/2416-hole-of-tears/

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Hole of Tears

The other day someone said to me ‘Write what you want to read’. And as a piece of advice it’s really annoyed me. Because the only thing I want to read right now are fairy stories. So I’ve written one.

In the heart of the city, amidst the hustle and bustle, lived a man named Ivan. Ivan was like many of us, entangled in the web of modern life, his days consumed by messages, notifications, and endless TikToks. Despite this, each night as he lay in bed, he felt a quiet yearning for something more real.

One afternoon, after a particularly exhausting day at work, Ivan decided he needed a change. As the sky turned shades of orange and pink, he chose to step away from the noise and go for a walk. Checking his pockets—phone, keys, wallet—he left his flat and headed toward the river. It was a wonderful evening, with the water murmuring gently and the setting summer sun casting a magical glow.

By the river’s edge, he paused, the city’s noise fading into the background. On a whim, he stepped into the river. The water filled his shoes, and his jeans grew heavy and wet, but he continued, drawn by an inexplicable urge. As he waded deeper, he felt a strange sense of calm.

Suddenly, a small boat drifted toward him. In it sat an old man, his hair as white as snow and his eyes as deep as the river was long.

“Evening” the old man nodded, his voice gentle yet strong. “What are you doing in the river?”

“I needed peace,” Ivan replied, feeling a strange familiarity with the old man. “I just wanted to escape the noise.”

“Well,” the old man said, “Wade a little further in, and I’ll tell you a story.”

Ivan hesitated, then followed the old man, the cool water now lapping at his waist. He touched his phone through his jeans, reassuring himself it was still there.

“Once,” the old man began, “In a town much like this one, there lived a very busy man named Robert. A cartographer obsessed with creating the perfect map.  

He pored over his charts day and night and worked tirelessly, convinced that with one more correction, he would know where he was and where he was going. But the paths on his map always needed changing.”

The river’s water was now at Ivan’s chest, but he was so absorbed in the story that he barely noticed.

“Robert became frustrated, his mind a maze of confusion. He wandered the streets, eyes glued to his map, ignoring the world around him. The people he passed became like ghosts, their voices mere echoes. Then one night, under a moonless sky, Robert, looking at his map, not looking where he was going, fell down a hole.”

Ivan shivered as the old man’s voice wove a spell around him.

“Trapped in a deep hole, with only the distant sound of the city above, Robert shouted until his voice grew hoarse, but no one came. So, he sat down and cried, and his tears began pooling at the bottom of the hole.”

Ivan’s mind filled with the image of Robert, alone and desperate.

“Robert cried for what felt like days,” the old man continued “and his tears filled the hole. Slowly at first, but then higher and higher and just as he began to fear drowning, he remembered his map. Folding it into the shape of a paper boat, he placed it on the pool of tears. Climbing onto the makeshift vessel, he let it carry him upward, buoyed by his own sorrow.”

Ivan felt the weight of his own phone, like an anchor dragging him down.

“When Robert reached the top, he stepped out of the boat and onto dry land. Just as he reached to pluck the map-boat from the water, it sank. He realised he didn’t need it anymore. He had missed the world—the world with the hole that wasn’t on his map.”

Ivan suddenly realised the river was up to his neck. His eyes widened with fear, and he reached out for the old man’s boat, but it was gone. His phone felt like a heavy leaden weight dragging him down. He panicked and with a final, desperate breath, he pulled it from his pocket and let it fall into the murky water. Instantly, he shot up like a cork, as if a burden had been lifted from his soul.

The water now seemed to support him, a comforting presence. He kicked his legs and swam toward the shore. The cool water invigorated him until his feet found solid ground. Stumbling onto the shore, he was breathless but exhilarated.

Turning back to the river, Ivan thought he saw a rowboat disappearing around the bend. “Thank you,” he whispered, knowing the old man had given him a gift far greater than a simple story.

From that day on, Ivan walked through the city with his eyes up, not glued to his phone. He savoured the sights and sounds around him, smiling at strangers and noticing things he’d never seen before.

He did get a new phone, but he rarely looked at it. As he walked around the city, he watched where he was going, careful to avoid any potholes, thinking of Robert and his map. After all, what was he going to do? Although his new phone might be waterproof, it definitely didn’t float. 

The post Hole of Tears | 2416 appeared first on thejaymo.net.

April 27, 2024

|

Permanently Moved 🔊 | Writing ⌨️

The moment I finished editing this week’s show about Cal Newport’s Slow Productivity, I realised to my horror that I’d made it before. Doing the things that actually need doing, when they need getting done? Finishing Projects? It turns out that this is probably the greatest challenge of my life. 

I’m at a total loss.

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

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Todolist Over Time

The moment I finished editing this week’s show, I realised to my horror that I’d made it before.

One of the wild things about making a podcast with a searchable public archive every week – especially one that touches on aspects of one’s creative life – is that after half a decade it can reveal recurring currents of thinking that might otherwise remain unexamined. 

2 years ago I made an identical show to the one I made today – pulling at the same threads, cataloguing my same issues. 

And so, through the magic of archives, today’s episode is about my ongoing struggle with personal time management and prioritisation going back to 2018.

Here’s the opening of todays episode to set the scene:

And here’s some of the opening from Episode 22-04

This is a thread I’ve been pulling on for months now. Do the Things That Need Doing and Dealing With Procrastination in November. The Urgent Anxiety of December and January’s Fear of Finding Out.

In fact, I can follow this thread all the way back to Episode 18-24. Where the first point for this episode is taken from. 

In 2018 I said:

Multitasking is largely misunderstood by everyone. Multitasking is holding a conversation whilst juggling, or walking along the road whilst speaking to a friend.
Multitasking can *only* occur when one of the behaviours you are ‘tasking on’ is so automatic that you can just leave it to run whilst you do something else.
What most people call multitasking, especially in a workplace context (or whenever we are in front of a computer screen to be honest) is actually task switching. Moving between singular tasks rapidly.

YOUR ATTENTION IS Sovereign

This morning I said: 

And in 2022:

I use Todoist to manage my day to day. In the app I have a daily recurring task called ‘Push Things Forward’. I only tick it off if I’ve done either of the following things during the day. Write 300 new words or spent 20 minutes editing/noodling on something I’ve already drafted.

In order to qualify, the effort has to be in addition to all the things I had scheduled to do that day. Hence the task’s name: Push Things Forward.

The problem is – he says. And this is by no means a world shattering observation. Noodling on 15 things and having a further 27 things I could start on means that I’m not finishing anything. My behaviour is literally the lady sweeping the sea meme. I’m not making any significant progress in any direction at all.

I even mentioned Todoist this morning:

But then I went on to talk about Newports classification system.

Here was my proposed solution two years ago. 

For the rest of the year at the beginning of each month, I’m going to look at the ideas pile, pick one or two things on the list. Then work on them to completion, to the exclusion of everything else that would usually butterfly my attention away

I’m going to full screen the things that need doing, and then do them, one at a time.

And what I was proposed this morning:

2 years apart! I’ve also just search my blog and my plan for 2021 was ‘Plan to Finish’ too 

If I’m being super honest, being unable to finish anything doesn’t just go back to 2018, but right the way back to young adulthood.

Yet mediation, the practice of sitting for long periods with nothing but oneself, simply experiencing the joy of being alive is something I have no problem with at all?

But doing the things that actually need doing – when they need getting done?

This Is probably the greatest challenge of my life.

I’m honestly at a total loss.

The post My Todolist Over Time | 2406 appeared first on thejaymo.net.

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

Day One

Journalling Journey

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

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

Discovering Day One

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

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

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

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

How I Use Day One

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

On This Day

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

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

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

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

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

Side Note

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

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

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

Permanently Moved

Internet Escape Velocity

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

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

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Subscribe to my zine
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Start Select Reset

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

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

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

Photo 365

The Ministry Of My Own Labour

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

Also this week I was…

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

Terminal Access

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

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

Dipping the Stacks

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

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

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

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

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

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

What if meditation felt easy? with Naomi Annand

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

The transfluxor-powered Arma Micro Computer from 1962

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

Reading

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

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

Asake

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

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

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

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

Remember Kids:

The post Day One appeared first on thejaymo.net.

Last week I wrote about how I’d been doing an ‘Insane amount of self indulgent introspection.’ Well, I’d been spending my evenings doing JBP’s Self Authoring program. I was gifted the course a couple of years ago, and finally had cause to do it. I really enjoyed it and its super useful as an exercise. I’d recommend it.

For me, all four modules came in at about about 16k words. Two really important things came up for me during the process.

I definitely have SDAM

SDAM (Severely deficient autobiographical memory) is a lifelong inability to vividly recollect or re-experience personal past events. It often goes hand in hand with people like me who have Aphantasia. My not-having-any-sort-of-visual-imagination results in an “inability to vividly recollect personally experienced events from a first-person perspective” as memories.

So I was merrily writing about events in my life that have impacted me positively or negatively. Things like being involved in hardcore punk community as a teenager, taking my 11+ and my decision to go to an all boys school, or going to NYC for TTW14. All sorts of stuff – good and bad! it’s a long exercise!

Later in the course it asks you to review, reflect on, and write in detail about the events themselves. At first I thought the prompts and questions were a bit weird, hard to square with what I’d written, but then it dawned on me that the course was just assuming I could recall singular moments from my past.

I had been writing about past events as things *that happened* to me, not as events that I had *experienced*. I mean…. I don’t remember experiencing school at all. I just know and recognise the emotions that come up for me now when I think about the period of my life. My memory of school is just a 7 year long streaky blur of events and intense emotions stretched across time.

Over the years in relationships, I’ve had occasion to upset people multiple times. Because I haven’t remembered events that meant a lot to us both: first kisses, first dates or whatever. I’m not talking about forgetting the date of a birthday like the embodiment some sort of walking talking sexist joke – thats what calendars are for! I’m talking about not remembering any details of the first time I said that I loved someone. I’m aware that it happened, but I don’t remember where, when, or what, we were doing when the words came out of my mouth.

Then they will remind me of some small detail and I’ll remember and say ‘Oh yeah!’ Some recollections will come back like the progressive population of the results of an SQL query. I’ve always assumed it was because I’m Aspie as fuck and forgetful, rather than it being a lack of autobiographical memory. In fairness, I can’t even picture the faces of a the people I love when I’m not looking right at them. None of them have known, I didn’t even know this wasn’t normal!

So this was somewhat of a revelation.

I wonder if this is why I’ve always been so interested in photography? Because I have no visual memory, nor visual imagination. I got my first SLR camera for my 16th Birthday in 2001 and haven’t stopped taking photos since. My Google photos library goes back to 2004 when I got my first digital camera and is literally how I remember a lot of shit. lol.

I Forgot I Nearly Died

I was about 90% of my way though the exercise when I wrote something about taking meds every day. In a flash, I realised that I had neglected to mention or even list ‘Being diagnosed with Crohn’s Disease and spending all that time in hospital at 17‘ as a major life event in my self narrative/autobiography.

This obviously was a bit of a shock. I had to stand up and pace around the flat for a bit.

How could I have missed such an important thing?

I’ve taken 5 tablets a day minimum since I was 17. I’ve had operations, been though horrendous pain like you wouldn’t belive. In my 20’s I had ongoing complications (still do to some extent) from a Seton stitch which had a major impact on my personal life. I’ve lived with chronic pain, dealt with constant inventory management of pills and prescriptions. GP appointments, injections and blood tests 4 times a year. Plus I very rarely, if at all, stayed the night in other peoples houses etc. I’ve even been in and out of hospital in the last few years!

I’m not writing the above because its a sob story. I’ve always just figured that I’m playing the game of life on hard mode. Like an RPG with an HP debuff or something. Sometimes in my more darker moments I’ve thought myself cursed.

Instead, I’m trying to get my head around how on earth I could have overlooked such an important part of my life story? I hijacked a box in the self authoring program to write up my initial thoughts, I’ve written about it multiple times in my diary this week and now I’m writing about it publicly here.

Maybe it’s because I think about it as stuff thats happened to me, rather than things I’ve experienced?

I dunno. Like a lot of disabled people with a non-visible/hidden disability, I tend to not talk about it. I’ve never made an episode of 301 about it for example. Now, I wonder why that is?

What is it about my current relationship to Crohn’s after suffering for 20+ years that meant I ‘forgot’ about it during the self authoring exercise? A program designed to surface important events in ones life.

I dunno. It’s something I’m literally going to meditate on. Seems important.

The War Inside

So yeah, back to the syncs and the point of this post. The whole ‘oh yeah, I have Crohn’s but I forgot about it‘ was last week. Then this week, I hung out with poet and performer Nick Von Kleist. We went for dinner in London Bridge and then went to the Albany theatre in Deptford to see the immersive play: ‘The War Inside’.

I was there in part to support Paul Freeman – the singer in my band – who did the sound design and has been talking about it at band practice for ages, but also because… The play is about – you guessed it – Crohn’s Disease.

It was fantastic.

Here’s the londontheatre1 review:

Inspired by Albany Associate Artist Camille Dawson‘s experiences of struggling with autoimmune disease, The War Inside tells the story of Marnie. Everything is happy, healthy and her body is functioning as normal. But before long, her body will be at war with itself. Undergoing the greatest struggle of her life, both Marnie and her organs will have to fight against the spiking disease and move forward with new perspectives on life, mortality, and identity.

This wild ride through the anatomy will uncover a rip-roaring story of bowel disease diagnosis with blood, tears, absurdity, hilarity, and humanity…all seeking to reveal what truly lies beneath.

The run is over now, but an immersive installation version is (I believe) due to tour. We arrived at the theatre and were ushered into a side room to don surgical gowns and hairnets to become ‘white blood cells’.

The play is set inside the body with various narrative trips and adventures to all the major organs. However the meta story, happening beyond the worlds edge (the theatre set) was very effectively told though ‘the eyes’, which in the theatre manifested as first person perspective film footage, projected onto a screen (see below).

I will admit, the early scenes during the play about a 16 year old shitting blood, getting drunk and trying not to shit herself at a party, was somewhat … triggering.

There is an emotional moment when laying on her back under a space blanket, she is admitting though tears to her mum (who was asking if she was on drugs lol) that something was wrong, and had been wrong for a long time, was super relatable.

The line “I think I’m dying” actually got a laugh out of me. I remember that exact thought!

The reason I found it triggering was because less than a week before I’d realised that I remember stuff like this happening to me too, but I don’t remember experiencing it. This is why the first person footage was so effective. I have no first person memories remember!

Re-experiencing the gut wrenching moment you wipe your ass and see the toilet paper crimson red (and then not telling anyone about it due to .. shame? fear?) via the film footage was really wild.

More importantly, my head was also spinning with the synchronistic fact that within less then a week of time I had overlooked this exact period in my life (and everything that came after) and then found myself at a play / immersive experience about that very moment.

Seems important.

Permanently Moved

Season 10!

Permanently Moved will be celebrating its 250th episode during this next run of 10 shows. I’m looking forward to achieving that!

Full Show Notes: https://thejaymo.net/2023/09/30/2331-season-10/

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

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Quarterly zine; my gift to you ✉️

Subscribe 🔊

Wherever you get your podcasts

Photo 365

The Ministry Of My Own Labour

• Started re-planning an old essay which already has a substantial draft
• Writers Bloc, the writing group I’m in met for the first time in a while. Very helpful
• Meeting in London with tonk.gg (ridiculous name for a company imo)
• Met NVK in London bridge and went to the theatre
• Received a book in the mail that I once owned and gave to someone
  • It helped me sort my life out in my 20’s. I’m going to read it again
• Much faffing sorting out my zine layout
• Call with an old client – no work with/from them right now 🙁

Terminal Access

Huw wrote a wonderful post 🔒 about depression and anxiety. The essay is built around testimony he gave at a recent Quaker meeting he attended.

Highly recommend this 30min long deep dive into the current state of open souce note taking programs.

I love it for this brilliant quote alone “Emacs does not resemble software any human would use out of the box”. The video will be of interest who anyone who can parse this sentence: ‘switched from Emacs to Neovim’

Dipping the Stacks

We Might Have Accidentally Killed the Only Life We Ever Found on Mars Nearly 50 Years Ago – JSTOR Daily

We suggested that microbial life on Mars might have hydrogen peroxide in their cells—an evolutionary adaptation that would allow them to draw water directly from the atmosphere

Drawing on your Dreams – proto.life

“In a dream, you behave very differently from waking life. Nothing’s stable for very long, [which is] especially noticeable,” says Green. If, for example, you’re looking at a piece of text and then you look away and back and the words have changed into something else, you can be fairly certain you’re in a lucid dream, says Green.

John Wick 4: Why each sequel references Buster Keaton.

Keanu says something really interesting to me on the first John Wick. He comes to me and he goes, “Look, just so you know, little bit of advice, when you edit, once a week, you should see the edit on the big screen.” And I’m like, “OK, we’ll try.” Later, alone with him, I’m going, “Well, why?” He’s like, “I’m a big-screen actor.”

The Marvel Juggernaut: With Great Power Comes Zero Responsibility

With this near-absolute domination comes the massive power of pop culture influence. Can products built for mass audiences present artistic challenges?

Figures in the Sky

Let’s compare 28 different “sky cultures” to see differences and similarities in the shapes they’ve seen in the night sky

Reading

X by Y

I’m still reading the large chunk of my mates book draft. its very good so far! came across myself which was weird.

Chip War: The Fight for the World’s Most Critical Technology by Chris Miller

As if spending the alst few years reading about the history of computing and semiconductors wasn’t enough, I’ve just started reading Chip War. I’ve been meaning to read it for a while, but its just come out in paperback making it a much more manageable bedtime reading than the EPIC size of the hard back.

War in Heaven by J David Osborne

JDO shared the final copy of book two in his God’s Fare no Better with subs on the Agitator Discord. If fast paced ultra-violent-chaos-magic-animist-cyberpunk is something you think you might enjoy then consider reading book one Dying World in the series in prep for War in Heaven’s release. I Read War in Heaven in three sittings. It just clips along.

My favourite bit in the book is when a guy got his dick bitten off by a monster, and then he grew a new one with a high speed drill bit at the end and used it as a weapon.

Only Forward by Michael Marshall Smith

Re-reading this 1994 sci-fi classic for Ghost In the Tome. PKD award winner and stunning debut from Smith. I love this book. I love it for the reasons all the people on Goodreads hate it. The second part off the story (the weird bit) is the best bit. Just getting to that bit now.

Masayoshi Takanaka – On Guitar

I’m 6 weeks deep into discovering Japan’s City Pop genre. I haven’t been on an obsessive deep dive like this in a long time.

Coming up for air this week I’d like to recommend Masayoshi Takanaka’s 1994 album On Guitar. Takanaka is an absolutely phenomenal guitarist and has been making instrumental albums since 1976. His 1981 concept album The Rainbow Goblins is a jazz/psych odyssey thats also worth checking out. On Guitar though, is an album that is just groove after groove all topped off with some amazing guitar work.

Tracks 1+3: Breezin’ and Just The Way You Are are personal highlights on this LP

Look how cool he looks on that record cover too.

Remember Kids:

The post I Forgot I Nearly Died appeared first on thejaymo.net.

There are weeknotes on this website that I have absolutely no memory of writing – at all. Looking for something else I wrote, I just came across ‘Types of Attention‘ from back in April. It’s only the 4th of June today so I only posted it 2 months ago.

I don’t remember writing it. I remember the all day band practice I talk about in the post. I remember being very present during the whole thing and I remember feeling/thinking about the things I wrote up in that post. But I have no memory of actually writing it. I mean, i’m glad I wrote it, but still its a bit weird not to remember writing it.

I write in my diary every day for 20mins right after breakfast. It comes out at about 1000 words a day. I have no memory of most of what I write in my diary either. Writing has become thinking. Writing is just a mechanism to catch the thoughts as they occur, I catch my thoughts with a keyboard, they are gone from my brain as soon as I’m done thinking them. The worries, frustrations, I have all goes away when I catch these emotions in my diary. The worst of it is all over, externalised and I can get on with. my day.

There’s well over half a million words on this blog now. Thats a crazy amount. Who knows how many words there are in my diary. Day One app doesn’t give you a total word count, which is probably for the best.

Anyways, given that I don’t remember most of the half million words on this blog, it’s got me thinking about it as some kind of public external memory. Colin walker has an ‘on this day’ feature on this blog. Surfacing old writing since 2008 and earlier. Maybe when I rebuild my blog I should do something similar. For my own benefit more than anyone else’s.

Permanently Moved

Update Interlude

Looking through my scripts for 2023, I realise I haven’t made a general update show since February. So let’s do that. 

Full Show Notes: https://thejaymo.net/2023/06/03/301-2319-update-interlude/

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

Photo 365

The Ministry Of My Own Labour

• Catching up on Admin after being away last week
• Worked a little on the novella but after putting it down I’ve lost momentum on it
• Some more light edits essays in worldrunning.guide. So many people are reading it right now… I probably should finish this part of the process
  • Considering doing a small print run when it gets to version 1.
• Sorted though a huge long list of things that need doing and prioritised them
• Sorted out last zine bits and bobs

Terminal Access

Huw and Ben’s Bad Gays: A Homosexual History just came out in paperback. I saw it on the front table of Waterstones during the week but forgot to snap a photo. Proud.

ADH put out a good newsletter on AI and its cultural depictions drawing on expert opinions he formed whilst working on the AI Policy Futures Project.

Dipping the Stacks

10,000 Gecs as 2023 Culture

Well, first of all, 10,000 Gecs isn’t that weird. If this is what passes for overwhelming strangeness in 2023, we are living in a conservative era.

“Blurred Lines,” Harbinger of Doom | Pitchfork

It was these sorts of power structures upon which “Blurred Lines” perched. The song was a fissure crack, revealing rot all the way down to the foundations

The Internet Isn’t Meant To Be So Small | Defector

The internet was supposed to have pockets, to have enchanting forests you could stumble into and dark ravines you knew better than to enter. The internet was supposed to be a place of opportunity, not just for profit but for surprise and connection and delight.

Britain Is Dead

To the extent that the UK is governed by a partnership between the aristocracy and the bourgeoisie, it is an aristocracy that is not aristocratic and a bourgeoisie that is not productive.

The root of Gen Z’s hyperindividualism – by kate lindsay

TikTok’s For You page algorithm has the unique ability to drop its users directly in the middle of an argument. Already several stitches deep, you’re forced to work backward for context. That’s confusing in the best of times, but even more so when the argument is about something as simple as “we should generally be polite to one another.” Yet, for some reason, it’s that opinion 20-year-old Canadian creator Michelle Skidelsky has been forced to defend again and again online

Reading

Zelda has eaten up all the time I usually spend reading. However…

I’m just over 80% into my 8th re-read of Altered Carbon. Some quick maths meansI’ve read this book every 2.3 years since I first picked it up in Borders Kingston at University. I’ll be on Agitator pod again soon for a round table on the book very soon!

Music

thejaymo.net Spotify Playlist

Face Yourself – S/T

I’ve been listening to the Sleep Token album ovcer and over all week. But it’ve been hammering it a bit hard. On top of all the Japanese pop music i’ve been listening to for months I needed a pallet cleanser. What better than to listen to some absolutely punishing dethcore?

Grosse Bagarre is a 1min long breakdown. It’s fucking heavy as fuck. God knows what the guitars are tuned to. B? C#?

RED has some fast and blast moments but it goes off the rails at 1m49s. I can’t imagine what seeing this band live must be like. The recording punches you in the face over and over.

It’s not just the spectacular riffs that make this band. The singer is phenomenal. Her highs and lows cut though all the noise and distortion and the gut rumbling growls are more intense than most deathcore bands can muster.

Wicked

Remember Kids:

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