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

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

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

Culture War Iconoclasts

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

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

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

Butlerian Jihad

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Information Age

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Social Media

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Health

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

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

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

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

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

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

On The Blog

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Permanently Moved

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Speaking of which:

Permanently Moved

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

Start Select Reset Zine

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

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

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

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

Start Select Reset 📑

Subscribing to SSRZ supports my online work and creative projects.

Get the Zine!
£5/month 💌

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

No spam. No email. Cancel at any time.

BYENNE

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

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

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

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

Experience.Computer

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

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

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

Experience.Computer 🔊

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

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

The Ministry Of My Own Labour

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

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

Off Grid: Red Team

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

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

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

Developed in collaboration with cybersecurity professionals…

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

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

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

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

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

The O’Ruggin Trail

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Companions

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Forest Bed

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

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

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

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

Photo 365 — Year 4

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

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

January

February

March

April

May

June

July

August

September

October

November

December

The post 2025 appeared first on thejaymo.net.

End of Year 2025

I think this is my last post of the year here on the blog. This time next week, I will be tucked up in bed sleeping off a two-part journey in my hotel in Colombo, Sri Lanka.

I’ll save any reflections on 2025 for proper Year End reflection post in early January. But I will say that I’ve felt like the end of the year has been barrelling toward me since I turned 40 back in July.

It’s been a much quieter year here on the blog, in part because after finishing the last/301st episode of Permanently Moved, it turned out that I needed a longer break than I was expecting. It’s all good, though. I’ve been working on other personal projects in the meantime.

Here’s a list of things you can expect from me in early 2026, and how they are all going to work.

Permanently Moved – Episode 302

How does one crawl back inside the biggest creative project of one’s life thus far and fire it up again? Figuring out how to get the creative machinery rolling in the new format has been more of an emotional struggle than a creative one. How do I restart it all, but new and different?

The answer to that question has been resolved to my own satisfaction, and I’ll be working on the text of the essay/episode right up until we leave for our break. I’m hoping it will be in a state ready to record as soon as I return in early Jan.

Start Select Reset Zine #15

The return of the show means the return of my zine. Like the show, SSRZ will be entering a new era: heavily expanded and printed at a proper zine printer rather than my local copyshop.

In its new incarnation, the zine will act as a supplement/complement to each episode of the show. Each stands independently alone, but together they represent the “complete” piece of media. I’m really looking forward to this model of self-publishing in audio and print.

This does, however, mean that I will no longer be publishing the full text of each episode online on my blog for people to read along at home. I’m fine with this for the following reasons:

1. Future episodes are going to run between 6,000–10,000 words. I’m okay with super-long blog posts, but web publishing is just not the medium for work of this length.
2. The wide availability of audio/text transcription software in 2026 means that if you are motivated enough, you can just rip your own text.
3. I will be publishing full transcriptions for the episodes embedded in the RSS anyways.
4. Future episodes might involve onsite location audio, interviews etc. A zine with text and photos is a better medium to translate the material over.

Lastly, to presage a point I’ll be making shortly: I opened the first paper issue of SSRZ back in 2022 with an essay called ‘Return of the Real’. This is still my over arching thesis about what is going on, and what is important given todays social and media environment. As such I see Start Select Reset Zine becoming the ‘merch’ for the show.

SLOP MACHINES OF LOVING GRACE

I’ve been writing a book all year. In fact It’s one of the things that was ‘leaning over’ from 2024 I mentioned really early in the year. Only at the time, I didn’t realise that it was a book. Right now it’s 38,000 words. It’s fully drafted with all the main ideas and chapter titles, but the last 1/4 of the text is still in very rough shape. I suspect that it’ll be closer to 50,000 words by the time i’m finished with it.

It’s quite a mad text about the current moment, tracing the emergence of the post-2008 condition. It’s about how software and finance fused into “Code Spaces” that now script culture, identity, and value as if the whole world were a casino running on vibes, rankings, and derivatives of attention. It’s a map of the Semiosphere: Real / Imaginal / Virtual, and how ordinary people get turned into data subjects. It’s also about AI, and why everything that annoys you about “slop” has nothing to do with the technology itself, but rather the changing nature of our ontology of media.

Quite a few people have read it in various iterations. In fact, I had a extremely wide ranging conversation with New Models Podcast about it, which will be out soon to round out their 2025 season on the ontology of media and neo-orality.

The plan is to release it as an ebook with an extremely permissive Creative Commons CC-BY 4.0 license. Though I’m open to doing an edit on it if a niche publisher were to pick it up and want to do something with it.

BYENNE – One Hundred Notes on Storydwelling

For nearly half a year I’ve been posting 100 little poem-essays over on my Leaflet publication (which, by the way, is a lovely indie blogging platform with deep Bluesky integration, and I highly recommend it). I have now completed the project with all 100 now online.

I just finished the first draft of the afterword this afternoon. All that’s left is getting to grips with the newest versions of Affinity Publisher to lay it out for print and digital.

Although the primary format will be an ebook, I am going to do a short print run that will go up for pre-order / sale. Paid subscribers can expect a discount code for the physical edition.

Family of Giants

All of my creative work that is physical needs a proper home. So, going forward, everything will be housed under an indie publishing name/label i’m starting with some friends called Family of Giants.

As things get going with our own work under the FOG banner, my/our ambition is to open it up and publish other people’s work too. I’m thinking long essays, or short stories, from friends, or collections of blog posts by people that need to be ‘real-ised’ into proper paper archival form.

Printing + Pre Orders

All this is to say that there is going to be a lot of DIY Self-Publishing going on around here starting next year. From previous experience in my 20s, this often results in huge piles of boxes cluttering up an apartment. Since I live in a one-bedroom flat, this is something I would like to avoid.

The plan, as it currently stands, is to release the podcast and announce the pre-order window for Start Select Reset Zine. Since the bulk of my show’s downloads happen in the first two weeks, that’s likely how long the pre-order window will be open. The zine will then ship out a month after the show’s release to allow time for printing and envelope stuffing.

What this means is that Start Select Reset will now be for sale!

I will be installing WooCommerce on thejaymo.net in January and making the most of my WordPress business hosting I’ve been paying though the nose for.

What this means for paid subscribers is… nothing: All paid/regular subscribers will be sent the zine in the post without the need to do anything.

But in line with the “merch” idea, I will have zines for sale with each new episode of Permanently Moved. The pre-order window will just give me an idea of how many zines I need to get printed and ship. My printer of choice works in 25-box increments, so my plan is to always get an extra box on top of whatever I’m initially printing (Subscribers + Pre-orders) to sell in an ongoing way. Once they are gone, they are gone.

Regular subscribers get free shipping; people buying the zine individually will need to pay their own P&P. If you want to sign up now and save in 2026, you can do so below:

On The Blog

November 2025 | Photo 365

Photo 365 2025. Year 4, Month 11.Photo-a-day for the month of Nov 2025.

Start Select Reset 📑

Subscribing to SSRZ supports my online work and creative projects.

Get the Zine!
£5/month 💌

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

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Photo 365

The Ministry Of My Own Labour

• Spent an afternoon running my own forecast/numbers for 2026 for a company I advise.
• Discussed my numbers, (and theirs, and plan and target etc) with the team.
• Spent half a day having coffee/lunch with a really brilliant person in Shoreditch
• Lunch with an old friend
• Calls. So many Calls.
• More edits on 302 I’m up to part 6 (of 10)
• Took another look at SLOP MACHINES.

Terminal Access

This long read in Currant Affairs title AI is Destroying the University and Learning Itself is the thing I’m going to leave you with at the end of the year.

When a 21-year-old college dropout suspended for cheating lectures us about technological inevitability, the response shouldn’t be moral panic but moral clarity—about whose interests are being served. Cheating has ceased to be a subculture; it’s become a brand identity and venture-capital ideology. And why not? In the Chatversity, cheating is no longer deviant—it’s the default. Students openly swap jailbreak prompts to make ChatGPT sound dumber, insert typos, and train models on their own mediocre essays to “humanize” the output.

What’s unfolding now is more than dishonesty—it’s the unraveling of any shared understanding of what education is for. And students aren’t irrational. Many are under immense pressure to maintain GPAs for scholarships, financial aid, or visa eligibility. Education has become transactional; cheating has become a survival strategy.

I would actually argue that it’s all much bigger, and much worse than this.

The whole post-industrial schooling apparatus, built in the late 19th century to regiment children while their parents worked the machines and to entrain bodies to clocks and syllabuses, is now colliding with media systems that don’t just carry ‘content’ over wires/pages/television but generate, rank and personalise it all in real time.

When we are arguing over AI, essays or cheating; we are actually arguing over whether people still get to share a single stable world of reference. Which even before AI its been clear with social media, and the internet that people don’t. I personally think we need to #accelerate the whole thing and go as fast as we can. And hopefully, at the other side avoid the years of blood/wars of religion that we got the last time something like this this happened. The printing press got invented and then 8 million people died.

Reading

I’m one chapter away from finishing Antimemetics: Why Some Ideas Resist Spreading by Nadia Asparouhova. Very timely book. Really can’t recommend it enough. It articulates everything that you have probably already intuited about the nature of media in the 2020s

I’m back on my James Hollis kick. This time i’m reading Swamplands of the Soul: New Life in Dismal Places. I’m only 10% of the way in and its a long more … Jungcore than his more popular better known works.

Still plugging away at Marguerite Porete: The Mirror of Simple Souls. And i haven’t had a chance to listen to any more of Mighty Dead: Why Homer Matters by Adam Nicolson at all.

Dan Nicholls – Mattering and Meaning

I’ve been listening to remarkable album from London-based keyboardist Dan Nicholls this week. Here’s the bandcamp blurb:

Nicholls’ music uses acoustic piano as its key element, transporting the instrument into new territories that sound remarkably natural and organic, whilst displaying a strong kinship with the world of abstract electronic music. The music utilises piano loops and field recordings as its key elements, forming what might be described on the surface as a fascinating ambient jazz record – but at the same time there’s so much more at play here on deeper levels. Dan’s music sounds at once otherworldly and immensely inviting.

After years of unlearning and unravelling the knots of a music college education – moving from a career in jazz, via electronic music, to a heartfelt embrace with rave culture and the feminist and queer theories which have so challenged perspectives across many disciplines on the objectified world and the values of capitalism – Dan Nicholls has spontaneously reimagined his relationship to the piano, that edifice of the decaying foundations of european classical music

The title track gives you a good introduction to the sonic pallet and world of the album.

Remember Kids:

The post EOY 2025 appeared first on thejaymo.net.

February 9, 2025

|

Life 🧍 | Permanently Moved 🔊 | Year End 🎆

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

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

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/

Show Supporter 📻

£5 MONTHLY 👏

Quarterly zine; my gift to you ✉️

Subscribe 🔊

Wherever you get your podcasts

Survive Until 2025

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Survive till 2025”.

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

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

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

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

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

Survived till 2025

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

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

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

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

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

Start Select Reset 📑

Subscribing to SSRZ supports my online work and creative projects.

Get the Zine!
£5/month 💌

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

No spam. No email. Cancel at any time.

The post Survive Until 2025 | 2501 appeared first on thejaymo.net.

December 14, 2024

|

Permanently Moved 🔊 | Year End 🎆

I’m proud of all my work this year. This 301-second experiment continues to be the most creatively fulfilling project I’ve ever done. It’s been a privilege to have you all along for the ride.

Thank you for listening, and supporting the show in 2024. 

Full Show Notes: https://thejaymo.net/2024/12/14/2430-eoy-2024/

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/

Show Supporter 📻

£5 MONTHLY 👏

Quarterly zine; my gift to you ✉️

Subscribe 🔊

Wherever you get your podcasts

EOY 2024

Alright then, 30 episodes down, and 2 hours and 30 mins of audio read from approximately 31,000 words of script.

Whether you’ve been here since 2018 or have only just stumbled across this strange, weekly, 301-second-long-experiment—thank you for listening.

Looking back at 2024, I can honestly day that I’ve enjoyed making every single episode this year. Even If I haven’t managed their release schedule all that well – making 30 episodes was much more manageable than the 40 I made last year. Which in turn, was way more manageable than the 50 episodes I made in 2022.

I know some of you haven’t been the biggest fans of some of the more experimental shows this year, but you were happy that I was happy.

And thats what really matters isn’t it?

A huge thank you to everyone who has joined Start Select Reset zine’s mailing list this year. Your financial support means so much to me and the show.

Shilling and asking for money is still something I’m very comfortable with but the reality is that this show is no longer possible without your support. So consider this a pledge drive. I’m looking for at least 20 more envelopes on the mailing list to go into 2025 in a good spot.

And of course, subscribing at £5 a month or £100 a year not only supports this show, but also my blog, and all the creative work I do online. In return you’ll get a IRL zine sent via snail mail four times a year. Head to thejaymo.net/zine and sign up today.

Looking at the shows stats this year, I think the year will end about 10% down total downloads compared to the last one. BUT having made 25% fewer episodes, so that’s encouraging – especially given the current upheaval in the online social media landscape.

Down in the details, the shows first 7 day download numbers have been static all year. But more and more of you listening are tuning in within the first 30 to 90 days. Which tells me there’s ride-or-die jaymonly fans who listen as soon as an episode drops, and a great number of you who listen on your own time. I assume based on subject or episode title(?) The YouTube version of the show continues to grow slowly, even if everything about it is totally antithetical to the platforms physics.

One unusual thing to report is that this year there are no ‘unmade’ episodes. Everything I’ve wanted to make got made. Probably because there’s been less episodes and less pressure. So less false starts.

Looking ahead to next year, (hopefully on a more sustainable financial footing), as zine subscribers already know. It’s almost time level up and use the moon stone.

Permanently Moved will be evolving next year

Over the six years I’ve been at this, podcasting has undergone profound changes. Shows have got way way longer, and with the rise of Substack, short form audio essays are no longer novel.

And I feel that 301, 301 second long episodes, is enough.

So in 18 episodes time (not that I’m counting) I’ll be drawing a line under the project and putting this format down.

I still have some unfinished business with The Artist series – I know some of you have been asking – so expect them early next year. The final episode of 301 will drop in the summer, just in tome for my 40th birthday.

After that, there’ll be a new logo and a new vibe. A longer, dare is say better, container. One that better matches our media environment. I am dreaming of eight or even 15 minutes to play with. A little more room to gather my thoughts, space for sound design, clips, or even interviews, etc. Which is why I was experimenting with sound design this year – something closer to radio than a podcast.

Speaking of radio: Experience.Computer, was derailed in the middle of Season 2 this year. Not for lack of enthusiasm, but rather a crisis of confidence and time pressure. Tightly edited interview episodes, on top of this show, my work, blog and everything else I have going on, was just too much. I’ve learnt some important lessons and the rest of season 2 will continue in the new year.

And finally, more generally, I just want for a moment to touch on social media at large.

For the entire duration of this show, I’ve considered these episodes my contribution to social media. I’m not interested in small thoughts typed into even smaller text boxes.

I recently heard the term “cognitive offloading” to describe the behaviour of users on short-form platforms like Twitter or Bluesky. And, it explains perfectly why I no longer feel compelled to participate in that environment. Perhaps to my reach and this shows promotional detriment.

I write thousands of words on my blog and speak for five minutes here every week. I’m intellectually satisfied. I have no little thoughts to off-gas into the ether anymore. And I’m happy with that.

So here’s where I’ll leave it for 2024.

I’m proud of all my work this year. This 301-second experiment continues to be the most creatively fulfilling project I’ve ever done. It’s been a privilege to have you all along for the ride.

Thank you for listening, and supporting the show.

Next year brings new formats, new challenges, and a new kind of Permanently Moved.

I hope you all have a wonderful Christmas and New Year. I’ll speak to you again in Episode 2501.

Start Select Reset 📑

Subscribing to SSRZ supports my online work and creative projects.

Get the Zine!
£5/month 💌

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

No spam. No email. Cancel at any time.

The post EOY 2024 | 2430 appeared first on thejaymo.net.

Previously: 2022, 2021, 2020, 2019, 2017, 2012

Another year, another wrap up post! I’ve opened some of them in previous years with words like ‘Terrible’. This year I’ll open with ‘Mixed‘.

On the train back from The Chalk after Christmas I read back through the 6 year end posts linked above. The main thing that jumped out at me is that I’m a lot happier now at the end of 2023 than I have been at the end of years previous.

Although this is not to say that the language I’m using in them doesn’t find some resonance at the end of this one too: stuck, uncertain, stagnancy, resistance, prevarication, procrastination. All words that could be in their third year of use. If I was writing that sort of year end wrap up I would reframe them all under the subheading of ‘Consolidation’. But I’m not – so consider yourself spared.

I also finished up my annual Year Compass exercise this week, and one of the key framing words for 2024 is Ambition over Goals. “I have the ambition to do xyz” rather than “My goals are xyz”.

During the course of my year review two major things showed up in my notes. One personal, one cultural.

Anxiety

Whilst I blog about things happening in my life all the time I don’t often share a lot of personal ‘goings on’. One of those unshared ‘goings on’ is that for the entire time since I came back to blogging – for the last 5 years – I’ve been suffering from anxiety.

Chronic/acute/debilitating anxiety, whatever you want to call it. I’ve had anxiety attacks, sweating, trembling, nausea, rushing warmth up in my torso, pins and needles, panic! I’ve had irrational anxiety about – leaving the house, travelling, seeing friends, answering emails, you name it, I’ve been anxious about it.

At its worst during 2021 was having these anxiety attacks multiple times a day. Over really stupid shit too: The doorbell going, a letter in an unmarked white envelope, withheld numbers ringing my phone during the day. One time I was stood in the supermarket aisle so anxious about the overwhelming selection of soy sauce in front of me that it took every ounce of willpower to not try and scream myself invisible.

I was quite frankly, living in hell.

As I type, I wonder now if I should not have sought out some help. But honestly this is Brexit Britain. What was my GP going to do? Put me on Benzos? 25 year old me also made a promise to himself that he would refuse to ever take SSRI’s again too. So suffering in hell seemed like the best possible option.

For 5 years I’ve tried oh so very hard to not let my anxiety get the better of me. To not let it stop me from saying yes to things. I’ve done so much, been to lots of places, and attended lots of events. But please believe me when I say that every-single-one of those experiences was a struggle.

In 2018 I wrote about my anxiety and that I felt like I was experiencing PTSD. This seemingly permanent condition of anxiety arrived into my life after the hell year at the start up I was last working at. The one that (looking back) gave me a nervous breakdown.

Little did I know back then that my anxiety would continue for years. When a long and deep period of depression lifted in early 2020, it was a real shock to realise during lockdown that I was still an anxious mess underneath. If anything it only got worse, the ash of existence during the protracted depressive period had covered and smothered it.

But last year my anxiety went away. It’s gone. Completely.

I started taking Inositol.

Inositol

I first heard about taking Inositol for anxiety via a Slack community I’m in and decided I had nothing to loose.

Formally known as Vitamin B8, Inositol is a type of alcohol sugar that has several important functions in the body. It influences the action of insulin and plays an important role in neurotransmitter and hormone regulation. When taken orally it has been shown to transform the microbiome and gut flora cultures too. I’m not going to litigate all the science about how it works. If you want to read about it you can do your own deep dive. But be aware that every few years ‘the science‘ goes backwards and forwards about Inositol’s efficacy as a treatment for anxiety. Some studies say it does, some say it doesn’t – in my experience… it does.

My diary tells me that I started taking Inositol on March 10th 2023 ”My inositol has just arrived! I’m looking forward to taking it”. March 13th “actually feel better, I’m going to keep taking Inositol and see where I end up.” On March 27th I was preparing to fly to Berlin and wrote the following: “Todays #anxiety about travelling is only a little physical. I can feel it in my arms. But I haven’t had any overwhelming sensations and rising panic etc – not yet any way. Packing has been a breeze.”

April 3rd “It’s interesting. I really do feel like it’s solved my anxiety problems.” By April 14th I was already planning on proselytising it to a friend: “You know what I’m going to tell her about Inositol. I’m going to tell her that it’s changed my life and that she should buy some and get some”. On April 20th I wrote the following: “Its just really nice not to have any fucking anxiety. This Inositol business has really changed my life.”

A week later on the April 27th 2023, I wrote this in my Journal:

So I’ve been taking Inositol for well over a month now. Between 1-2gs a day. It has changed my life. My anxiety has gone away, well the physical symptoms of anxiety. That hot rushing from the pit of one’s stomach, up the chest, into the neck, and down the arms. I still think about things that in the past would have caused these anxiety rushes, but now I just clock them, and either write them down to address later or just move on.

The lack of physical fretting, feeling sick about meaningless fucking pointless stuff has transformed my mental health. More space and time to address long term projects and push them forward, as well as doing the things that need doing right now.

I honestly can’t believe it. I am honestly shocked what a massive difference this has made to my life, simply from an over the counter supplement. A magic cure from a literal sugar pill – lol.

Years of dealing with all this fucking shit has just… gone away. I’m wondering now if the feedback loop of thinking something, feeling anxious, thinking more anxious thoughts because I’m anxious is now broken. Maybe it’s giving other parts of my nervous/endocrine system a chance to relax.

I was in Berlin for 30 hours for work last month and I left my bag in a restaurant (I was very very tired). At my worst I would have been a total wreck about this and found it difficult to address the situation. But post-inositol, I practically followed the steps a normal person would take. I called the restaurant, got someone in reception at my hotel to speak to the lady in German and then jumped in a taxi and went back to get it. No problems.

Obviously I was relieved to have my bag, headphones, kindle, switch etc back in my hands. But the peak levels of anxiety and worry etc I went though were far far below the baseline I’ve been dealing with these past years. I’ve had worse anxiety over soy sauce than I did leaving my bag across Berlin.

I’m still not ‘super chill’ about stuff by any means. But I just feel like I’m now reacting to things in a more reasonable manner.

Wow, writing it out like that sounds crazy. It’s been like 6 weeks. Wild.

Nine months of taking daily Inositol later and I haven’t had a single anxiety attack. I even stopped taking it for a month in October – to see what would happen – and I felt fine.

So that’s my story about how taking Inositol – a literal sugar pill – changed my life in 2023.

It was probably the most important thing that happened to me 2023. I’ve told lots of people about how it’s changed my life and for some it’s changed theirs too. Now I’m telling you.

YMMV.

Social media

One of the main topics of discussion on the blog since 2018 has been social media and my relationship to it. I put ‘Your Attention is Sovereign’ online way back in 2019 and I still get emails about it.

Four years on and I only now feel like I’m at the other side of what ‘taking responsibility for where one puts their attention’ means in practice. It took paying for freedom.to to finally get me there.

A brief glance over the 135k+ words I wrote in 2023 reveals I wrote a lot about the other side of my relationship to social media. The social stacks and their changing relationship to me.

Nobody Clicks Links Anymore, Audience not Algorithm, Threads, Carnival and the Bazaar, Make the Best Work Possible, Slowly Starting To Happen, It’s Just a Hobby. All leading up to my recent 9k word mega post on the history of Web2 and The Alms Race.

The collapse of social media has of course been on the horizon for a while, but when it finally arrived I was still buffeted by the choppy waters of the social seas.

It’s quite clear that what I was trying to do in 2023 in writing about social media was (re?)convince myself of the basic thesis that sparked The Alms Race. If you make stuff and put it on the Internet, people will find it, and some of them will stick around. An even smaller percentage might even choose to pay you to make more.

I was 10 years into a chronic Twitter addiction when I re-started writing here. Not that I thought I’d want anyone to pay me at the time. I just knew that expending energy on social media was a waste of time. So I started blogging and things grew. Two podcasts, a zine, an essay collection, and an aborted youtube show later, it all exists because some of you have chosen to pay. And I am forever grateful for your support. 🙏

I used to talk about my stats in these year end posts, but who cares? The only thing worth mentioning is that in 2020 Twitter made up 10% of my referral traffic. In 2023 it was 4%. Despite the collapse in referral traffic from social media and the rise of Arc and Brave browsers that leave no footprint, the fact the blog was only just 200 views shy of matching the previous year feels like ‘Consolidation‘.

The collapse of social media this year has been a good thing for the Internet IMO. As the post social web settles into new configurations more and more people will be joining these Isles of Blogging. More importantly I think, people will remember that this archipelago exists and come visit.

I’m incredibly bullish on any Internet that isn’t short form text or video this year. I think there’s going to be an explosion of creativity, writing, film making, podcasting / the making of great radio.

Permanently Moved

I made the traditional EOY episode recapping the year, so I’ll direct you there.

However….

Last year I got the making 301 ‘on Lock’. But in the process of doing so, the show lost some of sense of challenge that it once had.

Making 4 blocks of 10 episodes of 301 Permanently Moved and releasing video, audio and text versions as part of an efficient workflow is .. fine?

But it’s starting to feel formulaic: I think about what I want to say, I sit down and write it down, do an editing pass on, do a second pass to the final word count, then I turn on my camera and microphone and record it, edit it and publish it. The process of making the show probably takes a day of my week when you add it all up. 6/7 hours work all for just 5 mins of audio.

Do you think it’s worth all that effort?

I’ve found myself going backwards and forwards on that question all year. I’m very proud of the show and the body of work I’ve produced.

But is it worth the effort?

Some of the posts I linked above about ‘the changing landscape of social media’ were at times flying a little too close to whining about lack of audience growth for comfort. I don’t want to come across as complaining, I really don’t. 301 is a top 10 – 20% show depending on which comparisons you make. It frequently charts into the top 50 on iTunes around the world.

However, Permanently Moved is currently stuck in the steep climb up the long tail hockey stick curve. At times it all feels like a bit of a slog, compounded by the show feeling a bit stale in its making. I think it may have reached a local audience maxima, and I’m at a loss of how to level up.

The obvious answer is to follow the number one rule of online ‘content’ creation and show growth. Niche the show down to a single subject, worlds maybe. But I’m not going to do that. 301 is a personal podcast and always will be. Permanently Moved will always be about, whatever it is about, from week to week.

5 years and 250+ episodes, 301/Permanently Moved remains my most important creative endeavour and social outlet. But after all this time I’m a bit surprised that there aren’t more short little podcasts out there. The trend over the last few years has gone in the other direction – shows have got longer and longer. People unplugged from social media and plugged in their headphones I guess?

I’ve been listening to a great new show this year called Podcast Graveyard. An interview show with hosts who’s shows have ended. The single most important takeaway from this show has been ‘Know when you are done’.

We won’t get there until sometime in 2025. It feels a long way off right now but I know it’s going to come around quickly. So next year the show is going to get a little more experimental. I’d like to experiment with making the show directly to camera/audio. Skipping the scripting step – which would result in getting *hours* of my life back a week. But we’ll see about that.

Also, what sort of show would I want to make on Permanently Moved if I don’t have a 301 second long container? A big question.

First I need to figure out how to make it clear to the show’s audience that 301 is ‘a type of show’. Permanently Moved is the umbrella project / brand.

The first step might be a re-brand?

Permanently Moved

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

Start Select Reset Zine

I want to make SSRZ a more core/central part of the thejaymo.net extended universe this year.

The mailing list / print run has doubled in the past year. Which made inking and printing the linocut for issue #008 last week feel like a real underground press like operation.

Sadly, the mailing list is still quite far away from making 6 issues a year instead of 4 financially viable. But the good news is, if the mailing list continues to grow in 2024 at a similar rate to 2023 then I’m going to need to invest in an address label printer! Doubling the list this year would also make my the effort I put into my creative life make more financial sense. Anyways, I’ve been making zines since I was 10 years old and the fact I’m making one 4 times a year in 2024 is quite frankly RAD.

I also overprint each zine issue. Partly so new people who sign up to the mailing list can get a back issue when they subscribe. But also to give out to friends and acquaintances who I haven’t seen in a long time when we meet for coffee and a catch up. They are nice objects, and are far more interesting than sending more e-mail to supporters.

Just as I’m bullish on cool internet stuff I also suspect that more people will start to make/create more ‘real’ things this year too. Self published long form zines, experimenting with newspaper club, small scale booklet printing, and more physical things sent to paid supporters etc.

I know that’s what I want to do – watch this space.

Sign up below to get on the mailing list, I’ll post issue 008 to you in Feb.

Experience.Computer

If you missed the launch post read more here!

The reception to my new interview show has been amazing. Thank you to everyone who has listened/subscribed already! A big thank you again!

People have been saying “301 is so good, you should do a long form interview show!” for years now. But this sort of encouragement is also a kind of creative harassment. It forces you to think: “If I were to do an interview show what would it be? What would I want to talk about? How would it sound?”.

Experience.Computer is my answer to that question.

Experience.Computer 🔊

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

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

Asking people about their inner life, inner mental worlds and imaginative styles is exactly the sort of show that I want to listen to. Which in turn results in it being exactly the sort of show that I want to make. The interview style and subject matter is novel and – in my opinion – makes for a fascinating listening. I’ve very proud of it.

I say to my guests before we hit record that what we are about to do together is actually some kind of a ‘performance’ rather than an interview. I feel that this framing actually comes across in the vibe of show.

I claimed in last year’s wrap up post that E.C would be out in Q1 of 2023. But it actually took until December to get it out.

For two reasons:

1. Kairos – it came out when it was the right time for it to come out.

2. Season 1 as I’m releasing it has basically been ready for months. The original plan was for E.C to be a weekly show with 10 episode seasons (just like 301). But this was just way too much effort/work to stomach. Even if i front loaded all the work and got myself ‘ahead’ in terms on interviews and production I just *knew* that I would get behind.

Putting the show out monthly suits me, and represents a realistic amount of effort it’s going to take to make the show sustainable into the future.

My ambitions for the show in the long term are for it to be a cult hit. Listened to by creative people curious about others’ creative minds.

I have some vague plans for a video version of the show too. Which also aligns with how any theoretical ‘live’ version of the show would work. Which is something I’d really like to do in 2024. For 301 or E.C. Event organisers get in touch!

As more download numbers come in and the show finds its audience, I’m going to seek advertisers for season 2. I’m going to turn on monetisation in S2 also.

Episode 3, my interview with philosopher Reza Negarestani is scheduled to be released on Jan 15th.

Sign up on Substack to be notified or search Experience.Computer where ever you get your podcasts.

Worldrunning.guide

Earlier this year I realised that I could fold all the posts and essays I’ve written about worlds on thejaymo.net over the years into one location. As of the time of writing worldrunning.guide contains 22 essays totalling over 21k words.

Collecting all this writing into one place was the single best idea I had in 2023.

The document has generated freelance leads/work on worlds. I have had emails from some very cool people. It’s opened doors and been a jumping off point many great conversations. “I read your Worlds PDF” has been the opening line from strangers multiple times this year. How often do people read 21,000 words of writing before meeting their author for a coffee? I feel very blessed.

When I’m back from Thailand one of the first things I’m planning on doing is a reverse outline on the document. I want restructure it. And move all the essays around into new locations, under new headings and subheadings etc. This will bring the document up to version 2. I might do a small print run to celebrate – at least 10 people have said they would buy one so it might be worth it?

I will of course continue to write about worlds here on the blog and have things to say about them on the podcast. The nature of Worlds is a subject I am deeply immersed and versed in. Worldrunning.guide will continue to grow in size in 2024. I still have so much more to say on the subject.

Worldrunning.guide is a parallel project to the main quest – the book project: ‘The Web Was a Side Quest’. Which is slowly taking shape, but more on that in the next section.

The Ministry Of My Own Labour

I did some good work this year. Getting to consult on theoretical lore mechanics inside of large organisations after my ‘Lore as Lens’ podcast was super fun. I was involved in an in depth research project on live streaming platforms and their API’s. I wrote a bunch of 2 page trend/opinion/insight reports this year too. But this bread and butter – bill paying – work has unfortunately slowed down alongside the wider economy. Which means I need to find a new regular form of freelance income in 2024 … or you could subscribe.

I was an expert interviewee for the BBC, and also did a big piece of strategy work with some pals that took me to Berlin several times this year. I guest lectured at Imperial and the University of Michigan this year, and taught / guested at several tutorials at other Uni’s. I have no further commitments at UAL, so I did received my P45 from them. Losing my email address has been annoying. I also taught on the Writing the Impossible Object Course at The New Centre this year. And of course I got to speak about Worlds and Autonomous Worlds in Lisbon and in Istanbul!

I didn’t do much writing for print in 2023, something I’d like to change in 2024. How do I get on the commissioned writer website circuit? Although that said, my essay ‘Movement between Models’ with Ross McElwain was finally published in the Incredible Machines anthology from &&& last month.

Wassim Alsindi and I began hosting the writing group ‘Writers Bloc’ in the summer last year. It was a great experience to be writing alongside, and receiving support from so many other talented people. Checking in every other week. Season 2 will kick off next year – If you have a writing project you ‘want to get done’ and need accountability for it and want to join, get in touch!

There’s a lot more world-related work and opportunities out there in 2024 I think. When I’m back in February I’ll start exploring them. I feel like I need to write a brief text as to ‘why’ people should take techno-social systems as Worlds seriously, and why it’s important for culture at large.

Lastly on the work front, I have two big writing ambitions for this year.

One is to submit a book proposal for a short book on the concept of Cultural Fracking. The second larger one is to get the mass of notes, research, ideas and arguments I have for ‘The Web Was A Side Quest’ into some coherent form and also finally pitch that. Now that I know what it’s *actually* about.

Forest Bed

Played a bunch of shows with the band this year – and our EP came out.

Placeholder got some great reviews including: Americana UK, Mesmerized, and Plastic Mag.

You can order our EP on bandcamp and we still have some sweet totebags left!

Hopefully we’ll be recording it for a 2 track in the spring. Although Paul – the singer – was ambitiously pitching recording an album to me on NYE. 🤔

I did post some live footage from our recent gig in Sydenham on the blog previously, but here’s a video of one of our newest songs

Photo 365 – Year 2

As you all know by now, I’m a big advocate for regular and consistent creative practice. Last year I wrote that taking a photo-a-day was one of the ‘most creatively rewarding things I’ve ever done‘. In 2023 that morphed into ‘just a thing I do’. It’s way less bother to take a photo everyday for a second year running than it was during the first.

I think I took a far higher percentage of good photos in 2023 – compared to 2022 anyway. Looking for something to take a photo of every single day develops taste. It dials in one’s ‘eye’.

Dec 31st was #730 in my uninterrupted photo-a-day streak. And since I’m going to Thailand and going to be taking loads of photos anyway, I might as well keep going? If I can do 2 years in a row, why not 3? How cool will it be when I get to day #1000. How many people do anything 1000 days in a row? Not I.

This year I’ve also really enjoyed spending time on Flickr. I’ve been uploading my photos there as well as on the blog and I’ve had some wonderful interactions with people in the comments. Who knew that there’d be ‘photography enjoyers’ on a social network built around photos?

2023 In Photos

Jan

Feb

Mar

Apr

May

Jun

Jul

Aug

Sep

Oct

Nov

Dec

The post 2023 appeared first on thejaymo.net.

December 2, 2023

|

Permanently Moved 🔊 | Year End 🎆

As is tradition, here are all the episodes that didn’t get made in 2023, and a little note about Season 11 and 2024

Full Show Notes: https://thejaymo.net/2023/12/02/301-2340-eoy-2023/

Support the show! 
Subscribe to my zine
Watch on Youtube

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

Show Supporter 📻

£5 MONTHLY 👏

Quarterly zine; my gift to you ✉️

Subscribe 🔊

Wherever you get your podcasts

Alright then, 40 episodes down, and 3 hours and 20 mins of audio read from approximately 44 thousand words of script. 

Whether you’ve been subscribed since 2018 or have just arrived, thank you for listening to this strange, weekly, 301 second long podcast. And a special thanks to Permanently Moved’s paid supporters and zine subscribers for helping keep the lights on. 

If you would like to give the show a little Christmas bonus, please rate and review the show on iTunes or Spotify. Because as you’ve heard a million other podcasters say before, it really helps with the algorithm.

The last show of the year is usually a recap, but since Episode 250 was only 2 weeks ago I’ll direct you there. 

I will however keep with tradition and tell you about the 12 shows that didn’t get made this year. They are as follows:

Just as Dead: A show about how it doesn’t matter who you were when you were alive, after you die you’re just as dead as everyone else. Unless you’re very special.

Once Lore with Meaning: I’m definitely going to use this title sometime in the future as it’s a cracker. This episode was a follow up to Episode 23-13 Lore and Lens. About the importance of narrative in modern organisational management.

Stationary: Did you know that we call items like pens and pencils stationary because they were the first kinds of consumables sold where the seller didn’t go from town to town? I didn’t either, but I couldn’t find a hook to stretch the invention of ‘the stationary shop’ out to 1000 words.

When I Was Young: A tempting prompt to begin a piece of writing with. But in my opinion, it’s lazy and playing on easy mode. A phrase almost as bad for your creativity and mental health as using nostalgia as a hook. I never *ever* want to start a piece of writing with those 4 words. If you’re listening and stick around long enough and I end up committing this sin, feel free to call me out about it. 

Facing the Future: This was going to be about Solarpunk, and our cultures relationship to progress. What does it mean to walk into the future with eyes open, being optimistic in the face of things getting so much worse.

Not News: This is actually a completely finished episode. But I vowed at the end of 2018 that I wouldn’t pout out negative work. Anyways, was a tour of the major newspapers’ homepages and how most of what’s on them isn’t ‘news’, but a form of media better classed as infotainment. If you don’t have anything good to say, don’t say anything at all.

Dialogue Derangement: This was about the general ontological confusion about AI and how I think most of the press are at the wrong end of the stick.

Funko Drops: A rant about the company that makes Funko Pops destroying $30-36 million worth of its own collectibles as demand for its gamer bait has dropped off a cliff in 2023.

That’s Enough of That: This episode was going to be about the long term impact of the Declaration of Cyberspace, the UK’s Online Safety Bill, The USA’s Restrict Act, and Canada’s C-11 bill. I don’t remember why I didn’t record this episode, the script is completely finished. 

I Wish to Wind-Up a World: A fun sequence of words to say out loud. It’s just a title. I’m glad I finally got to record myself saying it. 

Reaction Videos: Another show script that’s basically finished. It opens with the lines: “It’s very late. I’m home alone indulging in a vice. A bad habit I picked up during the Covid-19 lockdowns. The living room floor lamp tripped its bedtime timer hours ago. Sitting in the dark, I find myself 3, maybe 4 hours into a certain kind of YouTube binge.”

And last but not least

In Defence of Neck Beards: This was intended as a heartfelt episode about the type of guy I knew growing up in the early 2000’s that became a milady hat tipper. I was essentially arguing that the early social webs ridicule towards this demographic produced something far darker as a result of its spite. But I abandoned it, as I couldn’t bring myself to write about incels and the manosphere. 

So that as they say, is what you could have won.

Enough content for a whole other extra season. At least I know that had I not adopted the far more manageable schedule of 4 blocks of 10 episodes this year, I could have made a weekly show for the full 52 weeks.

Speaking of which, a quick reminder: there’ll only be 3 blocks of 10 episodes next year as I’m in Thailand all of January. Start Select Reset zine will still be going out on its regular schedule however. My dream is to more double the amount of paid supporters next year and if that happens I’ll go from 4 issues a year to 6.

Sign up today at thejaymo.net/support if you want to get issue #008 delivered before christmas.

Also, you can sign up on Substack to receive updates about my new interview show at Experience.Computer. There’ll be some bonus long form audio coming out here on the Permanently Moved feed before things kick off with Season 11 next year propper too.

I hope you all have a great Christmas and New Year. Thanks again for listening in 2023, and I’ll speak to you all again in 2024.

Watch

The post EOY 2023 | 2340 appeared first on thejaymo.net.

Previously: 2021, 2020, 2019, 2017, 2012

Happy New Year everyone!

I have been tempted several times during the course of writing to click though the links at the top.

But Lot’s wife was transformed into a pillar of salt because she looked back on Sodom (Gen. 19:26). I fear the same will happen to me if I were re-read, re-view and re-litigate old thoughts about past years.

I have spent the last few years railing against cultural fracking, and over the last year (especially) I have also become deeply suspicious of nostalgia.

Not just the cultural nostalgia that is driving Brexit and the UK governments ageing voter base. But also the nostalgia that drives conversations at summer BBQ’s with old friends.

Lot’s wife became salt. An inert material. Salt is used as a metaphor for the imagined past she still longed for. A harmless past, a static one.

Nostalgia is the evocation of history without vitality. Treating the past as if it were no longer alive. The imagined past that lots wife looked back upon was inert.

Saint McKenna tells us that Rome Falls 9 Times an Hour. The consequences of its fall ripple out though time and disturb the pool of the present to this very day. The fall of Rome is continuous, there can be no nostalgia for its loss.

2022

Last year therefor remains co-continuous with this one. The future is like the present, only there is more of the past when we get there.

The body of work is the work of body.

So instead let’s look to the work of body as remains alive as last years body of work.

Permanently Moved

I closed out 2022 with the traditional EOY Episode so I wont repeat myself.

But I will say that I feel that much of the exploration of worlds last year was strong.

I’m sure much of it will find its way into (or referenced in) much work that is to be done this year.

The podcast (and this blog) is also my primary social media.

In 2023 I wish to move away from making easy episodes of the show that are nothing more than meta-commentary on things happening on Twitter. It’s cheap, low effort and easy.

Not what I want to do with my time or what I want to do with the show.

I will however continue to advocate, impress, beseech people to create, write, make, produce, do absolutely anything that isn’t wasting time on social media.

Start Select Reset Zine

Speaking of anything other than social media, I made and published 3 zines last year.

If you’d like to get on the Start Select Reset mailing list, become a paid supporter.

You’ll help keep the podcast up and running and in return receive 4 zines a year.

More Email?

As the the cost of living rises and the certainties of Web2 creator capitalism crumbles around us the ‘Support my emails for just £5 a month and in return you’ll receive … more email‘ model seems like a problem in the current media environment.

I can’t quite put my finger on why – though I tried in issue #002 ‘The Return of the Real’.

MAKING A ZINE, getting it printed, folding it up, writing the names and addresses of real flesh and blood people on the envelope, and then sending it to them in the post seems somewhat daring.

Even better….

RECEIVING a hand made zine 4 time a year in the current media environment?

Seems cool

Expereince.Computer

I spent a great deal of energy and effort in the final few months of last year working on a new podcast – an interview show.

It’s also exactly the sort of show that – if you know me – you would expect me to make after 200 episodes of a solo essay show.

The set up of the show, its subject matter and format is (I think) quite novel. It’s certainly like no other show I’ve ever heard.

Season 1 will be out at some point in Q1.

Get Hyped.

The Ministry Of My Own Labour

I did a lot of work that will never see the ‘public’ light of day this year. Much of that work was piecemeal also feast or famine.

I am promising myself right now that I will no longer sign any insane NDA’s that prevent me from talking about the subjects I’m interested in. For example this year I can finally talk about NFT’s in depth and detail again. Which seems a bit like a blessing now the white hot hate towards them has cooled off?

I’m really tired of doing good work for other people that goes nowhere because a different set of other people are disinclined to fund it, or take it forward.

Perhaps I should get a job. 🤔

Speaking of which, I also did quite a bit of world running / narrative strategy consulting throughout 2022. I’ve been inside some cool projects and wonder how they will progress, if they will get funded, etc. If they do I will point to it proudly and say ‘I helped with that’.

In addition to the perviously mentioned ‘worlds’ podcast episodes, the most important thing I published on my blog in 2022 was probably the post on wind up worlds.

That post has put me in rooms with people I had never thought I would meet or interact with. Autonomous Worlds on the blockchain are coming really fast. I know a lot about them. Surly someone will pay me to advise on one? I reckon that you reading this may play a game this year and have no idea that you are interacting with a distributed ledger.

I taught on two separate university courses last year as a guest lecturer. Super fun. Love Zoomers. lol

Taught the 8 week course on DAO’s for the New Centre alongside Ross McElwain from 𝔦𝔪𝔭𝔬𝔰𝔰𝔦𝔟𝔩𝔢 ⟠ 𝔬𝔟𝔧𝔢𝔠𝔱. I think it went really well, and I’m very grateful for the friendship that has emerged between Ross and I as a result.

I also did quite a few ‘expert interviews’ in 2022.

When the Canadian media fund trends report comes out I’ll post about it.

I was also interviewed by several agencies working for multinational corporations. I am aware that I sound like an alien when being asked about Web3 compared to their other experts they are talking too but I’m ok with that.

Also to re-iterate to myself as much as anyone else, I think I need a job. 🤔

The Forest Bed

My band recorded our first EP in 2022, it’s being mastered as I type this.

We also played several shows.

I heard at band practice that we may be playing Dent festival in 2023 – which will be cool. As soon as the EP is finally out we should be able to get a bunch more shows. Looking forward.

Also my parents got my headless bass fixed for me for my birthday after early two decades of being broken.

I’ve decided to play it all the time.

Because what a slow sad country band needs is a cyberpunk as fuck headless bass.

More than anything however, band practice every other week is a highlight in my social calendar. A chance to hang out with friends, directed towards a group/collective end, without alcohol involved.

Photo 365 – A Complete Year

Many years ago my old house mate completed a 365 project, ever since then I’ve wanted todo one too.

Taking a photo-a-day for an entire year has to be one of the most creatively rewarding things I’ve ever done. I can hand on heart say that I’ve enjoyed taking each and every photo.

I’m going to get them all printed and put them in an album.

In the beginning I was raring to go, and things started well. Then around the last week in January it dawned on me what a colossal amount of effort taking a photo of the day is. ‘Oh god there is so much year left to go’.

But you keep going, every day, every week, every month and complete the year.

Somewhere along the way all the regular creative expression builds up and it becomes more than just a daily photo. It changes the way you look at the world, the way you think about what you are documenting, where you are and what you’re doing.

Reviewing the complete set for the selection below, I feel like my photographers ‘eye’ was dialling around October. It only took 300 days of composition practice to begin taking ‘good’ photos.

Some of the best photos I ever taken were snapped in the last year. Photos I probably wouldn’t have taken if I hadn’t been doing this project or carrying a smartphone.

When Jan 1 rolled round, I just kept going. If I can take a photo-a-day for one year…. why not two?

In addition to sharing photos on my blog each month I’ve decided to return to Instagram and post them there as I go.

Already it feels weirdly retro sharing photos on that app in 2023. I may consider turning my account off locked.

In Photos

Jan

Feb

Mar

Apr

May

June

July

Aug

Sep

Oct

Nov

Dec

If you have made it this far and are still reading. Thanks for being a subscriber of this blog, either via RSS, Email etc.

I really appreciate your attention.

The post 2022 appeared first on thejaymo.net.

December 17, 2022

|

Permanently Moved 🔊, Year End 🎆

Alright then that’s it for 2022. 45 episodes, 3 3/4 hours audio read from approximately 42k words of script.

Full Show Notes: https://thejaymo.net/2022/12/17/301-2245-eoy-2022/

Support the Show
Watch on Youtube

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

Show Supporter 📻

£5 MONTHLY 👏

Quarterly zine; my gift to you ✉️

Subscribe 🔊

Wherever you get your podcasts

EOY 2022

Alright then, that’s it for 2022. 45 episodes, 3 3/4 hours audio read from approximately 42k words of script. Whether you’ve been subscribed since 2018 or just recently, thank you all so much for listening to this strange, weekly, personal podcast that’s 301 seconds long. 

Special thanks must go to Permanently Moved’s paid supporters and zine subscribers for helping keep the lights on. This show, my blog, and the new interview show I’m working on: All of it exists because some of you choose to pay.

As is tradition. Let’s close the books on 2022.

Permanently Moved past 100,000 all time downloads this year. A significant mental milestone. A much bigger creator once told me ‘Care about your stats till 100k. Care again at 1 million’. So that’s the plan. Several times in the last 4 years I’ve said that statistics have pickled brains. None more than mine.

After 6 seasons, 213 episodes, and 100,000 downloads I’m confident that people are listening, and now derive little personal validation from a number going up.

On the subject of statistics. 301 has been in and out of top 100 iTunes charts all over the world this year. Considering Desert Island Discs is Permanently unmoved at #1 in my niche, 301 peaking at 72 in the UK this year was pretty cool. Thanks again to everyone who subscribed.

Lastly, this years top three episodes by raw download numbers were:

Episode 2243 – What the Hell Is Going On?
Episode 2240 – The Internet Means Send AND Receive
Episode 2207 – Inauthentic Internet 

The following 7 episodes making up the top 10 were all within just 30 downloads of each other.

Anyways that’s enough about stats. Let’s talk moving pictures.

Most of you listening probably aren’t even aware there’s a video version of the show. It’s just me sitting at my desk reading from the script. I ingest the video alongside the audio into the editor. The video version has a small but dedicated following on Youtube. Why not like and subscribe if you’re watching right now? 

I started making the video version last year as an opportunity to learn how to work with video. It’s taken me about 18 months to get to grips with workflow, and I now feel quite comfortable with where I’m at. It’s about as good as it’s going to be without making something else – if you know what I mean. I’m now satisfied that I know what I’m doing, maybe I will make something – I just need a good idea. 

Speaking of good ideas, quite a few ideas for shows didn’t get made this year.  There’s 8000 words of unfinished scripts in the Google doc. They are as follows: 

The Idiot Box: Comparing how I’ve felt about the television since I was a teenager to how I feel about my phone today.

Xbox Live: A show about just how badly Microsoft screwed up the world’s earliest mass shared audio environment. From its early marketing, to the decade of unfettered free speech. What it did to an entire generation’s psyche is an open question. Especially to Men. Opinions about what is and isn’t acceptable on the Internet were formed there.  I’ve since written about this for an anthology that’s not yet announced. 

An Apology to Tom Jones: After listening to the complete Tom Jones Decca collection from 1965-75 earlier this year. I had no idea. The man’s voice is a weapon. 

Polycrisis Actors: I’ve had a bash at writing this several times. One day I’ll find the words to articulate the things I feel about this title. 

Co-located Memory: Continuing to get to grips with my aphantasia.

The Brand Called You: A show about an article I read in the computer lab at school in 1997 that predicted the next 25 years of the internet. 

Decorum: A word that isn’t used much these days. It probably should be.

Present Shock: 8 years since the book of the same name by Doug Rushkoff came out.

BoomerZoomers: I wrote notes for this after I finished teaching at Camberwell College of Arts this summer. All my students were born after 9/11. It was hard explaining rolling news’ the realtime terror alert level.

So along with a big list of other things in my creative and personal life, that’s an overview of what you could have won this year. See also Episode 2203 for a different list of things that I wanted to do this year and didn’t.

I finished last year talking about Urgent Anxiety. This whole year has been dominated by The Fear of Finding Out. The sea is so very big and my boat is so very very small. 

As the year has gone on however, my boat has become more sure and sturdy. No longer do I feel lashed to the mast, but I’m back at the helm. Things are going to get weirder and they are definitely going to get worse in the coming years. I’m emotionally and mentally here for it. I feel like I’ve got my panic out the way early to avoid the rush. 

It’s all good tho. The body of work grows one week at a time though the work of body. I’m proud of everything I’ve achieved this year, It all creates an ever more stable platform for the next.

I hope you all have a great Christmas and New Year. Thanks again for listening. I’ll speak to you all again in Episode 2301 in January.

Watch

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

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

The post EOY 2022 | 2245 appeared first on thejaymo.net.

Previously: 2020, 2019, 2017, 2012.

Happy New Year Everyone!

This year I spent NYE in the woods with some friends. No Internet, a Hot Tub, a v.Naughty Puppy and loads of booze. With several other set of friends testing positive for Omicron over the Christmas break we were really lucky to all make it to the cabin safe and sound. Glad we managed it. Despite the trip only being a long weekend, I feel like I’ve had a holiday.

I should preface this with the fact that 2021 hasn’t been all terrible.

It’s been a year full of laughter and love. I am ever so lucky to have shared it all with Eve.

2021 Was a Fucking Terrible Year

2021 has been terrible in the sense that I haven’t achieved any of my goals. Zilch, Zero. I didn’t even finish any of the major things I wanted to do in 2021 either. I just feel that I haven’t pushed my life forward in any reasonable way. I’ve been wrestling with all sorts of self generated blockers and bullshit that arrises from them. Mostly I suppose I’ve been dealing with what Steven Pressfield calls Resistance in the War of Art. Disappointing is probably a better word to use.

Just how disappointing the year had been only really became apparent to me in its closing weeks. As winter arrived I ended up dedicating 4 of the last 6 episodes of Permanently Moved to processing the year. Coming to terms with it. All the procrastination, anxiety, unmet goals etc

• Do the Things That Need Doing
• Dealing With Procrastination
• Urgent Anxiety
• EOY 2021

2020 was probably for me, defined for me by states of new possibility and exception. But 2021 was a stagnant pool.

As the weeks and months ticked by, time seemed behave like thick syrup. I struggled to make firm decisions, and failed to find routes though. To make gesture in any direction beyond where I’ve been for the last 12 months felt like drag a limb though treacle. The state of the world around me seemed to cling on with every attempt to place one foot in front of the other. I was just sitting around waiting for stuff to happen. It’s as fine strategy as any, but life is more fulfilling when you are make things happen for yourself. I’m going to tell young people when I’m old that 2020 was great, but 2021 was terrible.

I realise that the above sounds like I was depressed. I have wondered. But considering the state I had been mentally pre-lockdown 2020 I really don’t think it was. I’ve been very aware that the resistance to committing to the things I want to do and areas that I want to explore. Conscious prevarication. Creative and professional paralysis. On reflection I think 2021 was a year I experienced a massive personal crisis. It’s been 12 years since my last one. To make a decision and move forward with confidence risked me finding out that I am not the sort of person I believe myself to be. But fuck it. Maybe I’m someone different. Fuck around and find out in 2022.

Despite what the photos suggest below 2021 was spent mostly indoors. Peering out upon the world via technological portals as to the state of it. None of them it turned out could be trusted. The media and social media continued its decade long human centipedel spiral. The shit eating feedback loops have just become faster and tighter with every passing month.

Status chasing and clout farming continues to erode the social sphere in really depressing ways. I don’t have much hope at all that it’s going to improve at all.

Honestly just thinking about it is making me annoyed…

A Rant About Social Media

The social seas were choppy and frothy as all hell all year. If the metaverse exists already (which it does) then Twitter is an online ghetto for people addicted to stressing their limbic system and burning out their amygdalas – its a hell right out of cyberpunk.

The amount of wasted breath, and rage over whatever it is that one needs to signal for status about in the current moment was baffling and really depressing.

In the old days it used to be if what you were seeing on Twitter annoyed you it was because you were following the wrong people. In 2021, Twitter shows you one step beyond the feed. So you see whatever hell the people you follow who follow other people are going on about. There’s no escape no matter how often you mark tweets as not relevant or not interesting.

At the end of the day none of that matters, especially not to me. The main character or trend on Twitter only matters to the people who participated in that particular battle in the culture war. Perhaps twitter should gamify this. Give out medals for participation in Bean Dad discourse or a Trophy to people who fucked over Isabel Fall, and then another one for pretending they didn’t contribute to the shit storm in any way despite receipts.

Maybe some kind of limited edition badge? unique and digitally signed to a Twitter address. Maybe even displayed in some sort of gallery?

Speaking of NFTs and Web3: What went down around this subject on social media last year was absolutely disgraceful. Behaviour by people on all sides of the culture war engagement on this reached new highs of stupidity, outrage and really terrible social shaming.

Thank god some cool heads like Mat and Holly are out there.

It’s not just social media though is it? There’s still the shit swallowing feedback loop that causes all the brainworms in the first place. Just today I read an article in the Metro about Blockchains and NFT’s thats so full of half truths its actively misleading. To read that article as ‘news’ would result in being less informed about the subject at the end than when you started reading it. That is if you can read the thing in amongst all the adverts and blocks of content trying to get you to read something else.

I can only assume at this point that the same thing is going on across all media. If every article I’ve read about subjects I don’t know about contain as many errors as the ones that I do have some expertise in… the scale of miss-information in our society is mind-boggling.

All the light and heat and unproductive rage of 2021 about NFTs hasn’t stopped Samsung putting NFTs in its new TV’s though hast it? Perhaps market places for collecting and displaying high def digital art might finally become a thing. Who knows maybe even artists might make some serious money. I’m interested and optimistic. They should partner with Art Station or something.

I have 14 unposted drafts from 2021 all in the Dimensino category mostly about the Dweb and NFTs. I wasn’t scared to post them, I guess due to the paralysis mentioned above just couldn’t be bothered. Whats the point?

I will have been on Twitter for 14 years in 2022. It’s no longer to my tastes. Yes I’ve met a lot of IRL friends on there. But it’s become a dangerous social poison. I think I might be finally done with it.

My Attention is Sovereign and I wish to spend exactly zero time paying attention to – and getting annoyed about other people getting annoyed about – things that I can do absolutely nothing about or have control over.

Health

I caught Covid in July, it sucked. It was only a matter of time – it is a global pandemic after all. The following months August though mid October were an absolute right off both physically and mentally. Dealing with brain fog was hard. I still have a slightly altered sense of smell which is annoying, and I also had a huge allergic reaction recently – supposedly its dust mites, which apparently is also long covid related. In addition for the first 3 weeks after coming out of isolation even a 10min walk around the block would require me to have a lie down for an hour. It would totally wipe me out. I’m still not convinced my fitness has fully returned either.

Speaking of health, I had another colonoscopy in 2021 and everything was fine. Meaning I’m now 4/4 for cameras in *a hole* in as many years. My endoscopies last year and the treatment I got following them meant I’ve only experienced a couple of instances of aphagia in 2021. Which means despite catching Covid and being miserable for 2.5 months, my Crohn’s still seems to be in remission and I didn’t choke to death. So no serious problems, happy days.

The best thing I’ve purchased this year thats improved my personal quality of life this year has been my vertical mouse. Its been 6 weeks so far and my wrist pain is feeling so much better. I can even put some weight on it, if it continues to improve I’ll do the 100 press ups challenge again.

Stats

In past years I have shared stats on all sorts of things. The number of words written on the blog, number of words in my diary, podcast downloads, blog views, how many hours of meditation I’ve done during the year… all sorts of things.

But honestly it doesn’t seem worth it to me this year. Not because I don’t want to share them, but because 2021 was the year I realised I’m over quantification. Stats in-and-of-themselves are mental traps. They become proof of work, a source of self gratification.

If you are doing something brings you joy then keep doing it, if it doesn’t – stop doing it. It really is simple as that.

In 2022 I’m only going to pursuing things that I hope will bring me joy in the doing, rather than in having done.

Matt Webb wrote recently over on interconnected about the trap that stats and second guessing ones audience

With email newsletters you can get obsessed with “audience” and making each edition “worth” hitting your readers’ inboxes… but with blogging you can let the idea lead. There’s just enough open air to keep you honest. Only do write regularly, otherwise each post becomes an event.

It really rang a bell with me and I’ve been thinking about it a lot whilst walking in the woods in the rain. I think instead of stats, I’m going to care about vibes.

Support

I’d like to make ‘creating stuff online’ a full time endeavour. With the kind support of people like you, that ambition is slowly becoming a reality. Supporting me at any level will allow me to do and make more.

The Ministry Of My Own Labour

I’ve written a ton of commissioned work this year, some of which has been published so far, most of it hasn’t.

I’ve done some fun projects in my professional life, but I’m thinking it might be more fun to … actually have a real job (?!?). One that has real goals, objectives and timelines that extend beyond 6-12 weeks.

I’ve realised that the things I care deeply about are things that no one else cares about, so I should just write and talk about them more.

I’m really pleased that public speaking picked up again in 2021. It’s one of my favourite things to do.

My slow sad country band started rehearsing again in 2021. We’re recording an EP soon. I can’t wait to play some gigs.

In Photos

The post 2021 appeared first on thejaymo.net.

December 19, 2021

|

Life 🧍 | Permanently Moved 🔊 | Year End 🎆

2021 has been a terrible year, far worse than 2020. There is no point in dwelling on it. The next year will unfold from the last.

Full Show Notes: https://thejaymo.net/2021/12/19/301-2148-eoy-2021/

Watch 301 on youtube: https://www.youtube.com/c/jayspringett

Support the Show! https://thejaymo.net/support/
Website: https://thejaymo.net/

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

Show Supporter 📻

£5 MONTHLY 👏

Quarterly zine; my gift to you ✉️

Subscribe 🔊

Wherever you get your podcasts

EOY 2021

Well that’s it. All done for the year. We made it to the end of Season 4 of 301. I’ll think I’ll be back with Episode 22-01 the weekend of the 8th Jan. That said, it occurs to me that I have an all day band practice that day … Anyways. 

I’m looking forward to taking a break and recharging. But most of all I’m looking forward to spending some time with my family.

As has become tradition around here. Let;s cover some of stats for EOY 2021. I really do think it’s important that creators talk about and share these things.

This little one man band of a 5 min podcast is closing out 2021 with just over 72.5k all time downloads to its name. A big number by anyone’s estimation.

Growth took a downturn in the second half of this year. Which saw downloads per month in Q4 falling to half what they were in Q1.

The devil however – is in the details. 

The important metrics continue to trend upwards month on month. Those metrics being the number of downloads an episode gets within the first 72 hours, and after 30 days of release. My current numbers put me in the top 10% of podcasts or top 50% world wide depending on the metric.

The top three episodes of the year by downloads were:

1. 2105 – The Political Voice as Demonstrated by the Councillors of Handforth
2. 2107 – Solarpunk, Stacktivism and Cold Texas
3. 2101 – In The Archipelago

Speaking to other podcasters. Overall download numbers have slowed for some of my friends too in H2 of 2021. Apparently iOS 14.5 changed the default behaviour for new subscribers in the podcast app. ‘Download All’ is no longer as prominent in the UX for new subscribers.

Moving on from audio. As you may or may not know, for the last 6 months I have been making a video version of the show. It goes up with the podcast on my youtube channel. 

That has been a learning experience for sure. It turns out it *wasn’t* as simple as – turning on a camera when I’m recording the audio – as I thought it was going to be. (See Episode 2122). I added the video component to the show during the summer this year as a creative challenge. Whilst I only just feel like I’m making progress with that part of the whole endeavour. It’s been enjoyable.

I know I’ve mentioned it before, but consistency is so important to me creatively. Doing something every week and putting it out is not just a commitment but an opportunity. An opportunity to learn and improve week after week. I am really pleased with all the new skills I’ve picked up this year, and have honed down the show’s expanded production workflow.

I’m now in a position where I feel confident enough to try and make some more ambitious things for audio, and explore some stand alone video too.

Speaking of making and doing more, a huge thank you to all the paid supporters of this show. You bought the camera, and your support makes it all worth it.

I’m currently just 3 paid supporters away from having the budget to overhaul my website. I want to offer proper email and subscription management. I also want to join the RSS club and post exclusive things for people using feed readers.

In 2022 I’d also like to start sending anyone supporting me at £5 a month and above a physical newsletter in the post. My minimum goal for 2021 was not to actively loose money on my creative endeavours on the internet. So bootstrapping it is. Doing all this outside of the Patreon or substack ecosystem however costs money.

So If you’re feeling the Christmas spirit and would like to support me or the show financially, please head over to www.thejaymo.net/support 

Thank you again to everyone who already has. 

To round out the stats, with the release of this episode I will have made 4 hours of audio this year. There’s 52k words in my script document with 6 abandoned episode topics. The titles being: Anti-Nostalgia, Press publish, Think in 1k, Barcodes, Rhythm & Repetition, and Software Surfaces.

Now they’re all out the way, I’ll reiterate what I said in Episode 150. I’ve learned this year that stats are simply proof of having done. Caring about them keeps you stuck in the past. Appropriate for an end of year roundup yes, but as a day to day concern? Not so much.

2021 has been a terrible year, far worse than 2020. It’s been a year of total stasis and suspension. A total failure to make any significant progress across a variety of endeavours. A year of urgent anxiety, quiet brooding and ennui.

But it’s ok. I even have differences with my own opinion. Perhaps this year has just been a great deferral, a hangover from the intensity of the last. I have felt at times, like I’ve been sitting on the lid of a boiling pot. Or the cover of a seething well, bubbling with possibility. 

There is no point in dwelling on it. The next year will unfold from the last. The space weather suggests I have a year of Lights, Camera, Action ahead. But I will take things as they come. 

I don’t really make resolutions. But I will try to live in and enjoy the present, and do all the things that need doing, when they need getting done.

Thanks again for listening this year, I’ll be back for season 5 in the next one. 

Watch

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

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

The post EOY 2021 | 2148 appeared first on thejaymo.net.

Retrospectives are dropping into my RSS reader. Here’s mine.
This post adds to the sporadic collection of previous retrospectives on the blog: 2019, 2017, 2012.

I got absolutely hammered last night on Houseparty hanging out with friends. As is usual, dress code for new years was formal ware. It was funny to see the team all dressed up with no where to go. As the evening wore on the call got more and more shambolic. People talking over each other, multiple conversations at once etc. Then about 1am it got chaotic as another group of friends raided our call and all hell broke loose. I went to bed shortly after. Fun times.

I totally failed at getting my haircut. I haven’t had a trim since before I spoke at Tredwells before the first UK lockdown. So my aesthetic heading into 2021 reveals my true power level as an eccentric, writer, shut in.

I guess one day re-read all my weeknotes for 2020 and decide how my year went. But today isn’t that day. My personal diary was also quite patchy from March though June. But I don’t mind, as it would be an understatement to just say “It’s been a fucking weird year”.

Friends have lost loved ones, others have borne the full weight of isolation upon their souls and shoulders, others have burnt out. Existence has been a struggle for some.

For my part, there were periods of disappointment and difficulties but no tragedies. The pandemic squashed plans and work dried up alarmingly (I am free from mid Jan if anyone is interested in collaborating or contracting me). Due to our circumstances we’ve had a much better time of it than others. So by the grace of God my year was actually ok.

I know I am very fortunate and blessed to be able to say that. Eve and I strapped ourselves to the mast whilst the waves have been so very large. We have enjoyed each others company, which is a good thing, seeing as there’s been so much of it.

We are so lucky to have a flat to ourselves and a garden that effectively becomes another room of the house from late spring to early autumn.

2020

I sat down to write this post and ended up with 3k garbled words on the future.

Essentially 2020 has been a practice run/preview for living under the 21st Century condition: Indeterminacy. After finishing the draft I realised I had responded to a pre-print essay on ‘Gyropolitics’ by Benedict Singleton who shared it me just before Christmas. It was also deeply personal. So it’s gone into Gdocs for a deeper re-write a review of the material at some point.

So let’s try again…

I’m incredibly grateful for everyone who has chosen to support me, my blog/podcast/Youtube show this year. I ended 2020 just £9 shy of the “If I hit this per month, then this is something worth pursuing” goal I had in mind when I turned on monetisation in August.

If you are feeling generous this new year and like my work or whatever, please do consider supporting it with a regular subscription.

2020 has also been an exciting year creatively. Almost everything I’ve published on the Internet since I started blogging regularly here in 2018 was produced under a multi-yearlong cloud of depression – at varying levels of severity. This podcast I made in 2019 on Depression is still one of the best things I think I’ve made.

This year as everyone else went into Lockdown 1 in the UK and began to find things really grim, the weight of ashen sadness that had been pressing down on me for the past few years evaporated away.

In fact – I can pin point the exact moment that I realised that it had lifted as I talked about it in a podcast.

I’ve really enjoyed throwing myself in to completing more things, thinking in public, etc this year. The blog has seen 340% growth in 2020 and I intend to keep the momentum up.

I’m going to make a few changes to the site and change the way that I am ‘online’ for 2021 but I’ll write about that in my week notes tomorrow.

In Numbers

Blog: 149,686 words
Podcast Scripts: 52892 words
Podcast Episodes: 51
November Nanowrimo: 52855 words
Other Writing: 85,087 words
Fiction: 40,674 words
Diary: 53,012 words
Youtube Videos: 13

Music Tracks: 3 (All unfinished)

In/Em Bodiment

It’s funny talking about how I got over my depression this year. I said the same thing last year.

But when you are at the bottom of a hole any more daylight is welcome.

I will have been taking meditating seriously for 8 years in 2021 which is kind of bonkers. But the practice has been the most sporadic it’s ever been this year. Sharing a house with Eve 24/7 365 has been a different environment in which to meditate.

But I’ve managed to do at least 40mins, 3 days a week. My timer app says I put just over 150 hours in this year. Which is a lot less than the nearly 550 hours I did in 2019, and about 400 I did in 2018.

I’m not bothered tho. I’ve found I can recall states much more quickly when I sit down now than I have been able to before. I have continuing to experiment and explore other exercises this year too.

I’ve also done a lot of reading of Christian mystics this year. I read all of St Thérèse of Lisieux body of work and returned to the writings of both St John of the Cross and St Teresa of Ávila several times. 2021 I think will mainly be concerned with the works of Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite. Getting to grips with the ‘western christian mysticism extended universe‘ as it were.

I have also deeply appreciated the writings of John Butler. I put his autobiography ‘Spiritual Unfoldment’ as one of my picks for Ignota’s books of the year list. If you don’t follow his Youtube Channel I really recommend it!

I’ve also enjoyed exploring the basics of somatic movement this year and would like to find an instructor in 2021.

The Ministry Of My Own Labour

Freelance work was a little thin here and there. I wrote several trend reports and strategy docs for folks which I cant talk about.

I’ve enjoyed all the interactions with Novara Media this year in my advisory role. They have fucking smashed it this year.

I’m also really proud of some of the things I’ve done independently:

Putting out 50 podcasts in a row and starting a youtube show is quite an achievement.

I also published my first short story and become a ‘published author’ lol

I also wrote the introduction to a Solarpunk anthology due out in 2021, and contributed to the Unsound 2020 book.

My band didn’t end up recording our album this year but thats ok I guess.

In Books

I read 65 books this year according to Goodreads. But I actually read way more as I got lazy with tracking over the summer. My Goodreads is mostly WARHAMMER 40k lol as there are so many you need to track that shit.

In Photos

Have a good 2021 Everyone.

Your Attention Is Sovereign.

The post 2020 appeared first on thejaymo.net.

December 20, 2020

|

Permanently Moved 🔊 | Year End 🎆

Closing out Season 3, 50 Episodes in 50 weeks!

Thanks to everyone for listening in 2020. Speak to you all next year.

Full Show Notes: https://thejaymo.net/2020/12/20/301-2050-eoy-2020/

Webshow: http://comeinternetwith.me
Website: https://thejaymo.net/
Support: https://thejaymo.net/support/

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

Show Supporter 📻

£5 MONTHLY 👏

Quarterly zine; my gift to you ✉️

Subscribe 🔊

Wherever you get your podcasts

EOY 2020

We made it! 50 weeks, 50 podcasts in a row. JUST.

The show is a little late this week, as you can imagine a combination of, ‘just that time of year’ on top of the utter shitshow that was Jupiter following Saturn into Aquarius yesterday.

Well, that’s this year done, by clock and calendar time at least. By plot time, it still has some ways to run yet. Anyway:

Firstly

I’d like to say a big thank you to everyone who is listening and for following along this year. 

This little one man band of a 5 min podcast is closing out 2020 with 44,000 downloads to its name. Which is a big number by anyone’s estimation.

Excluding the audio essay This Is It. The most popular episodes by downloads I’ve made this year are:

2028 – Do You Remember MSN?
2019 – Animal Crossing Is The Place For Taste
2008 – Role For A Thought Leadership Check

Which is interesting, given the type of episodes that they are, the shape of them and their subject matter. 

For whatever reason, the episodes I am most proud making are always the ones that get shared and liked the least.

For what it’s worth, I enoyed making the following episodes:

2013 – Notes From Lockdown
2022 – Sonic Geography
2029 – How To Make An Episode Of 301

This is after all a personal podcast.  Every episode I’ve ever made is the one I’ve wanted to make that week. So I’m just going to keep doing whatever I feel like doing.

Secondly

This episode’s script has been a struggle. I am it seems not mentally ready to take an introspective or retrospective turn. 

So to ease myself in, I went back and listened to 2019’s End Of Year podcast. It’s the first time I’ve listened to it since I made it last year. 

I said that I wanted to institute some ‘new normals’ in my life for 2020. They were new years resolutions or goals of sorts. 

They were: 

• Finish what I start, 
• Continue to make and create things that bring me joy. 
• Be more disciplined with my time and energy and direct it towards the things I enjoy. 

I am pleased to report that those ‘new normals’ have served me well. I have by and large finished a lot of things that I started this year. Far more than in previous years that for sure.

I did a deep dive assessment of how things were going back in Episode 100 or 2031. My feelings about the show are still more or less the same. You can go back and listen to that if you feel like it.

As I end season 3. I’m pleased to have got to grips with and embraced the discipline of creating something on a schedule. Deciding what ‘good enough’ means to me comes easier every week too.

I will also continue to stress. This podcast has been an important outlet for me, and for my mental health since it began. Starting this show has quite frankly improved my life. It’s a regular beat in the week that I orbit around.  

I also said last year that I didn’t enjoy spending hours and hours on social media watching the world scroll by. 

It’s so weird to me that doom scrolling is a word that got invented this year. It’s a phenomenon that just needed a name. 

I actually think (unlike many people on social media). That everyone should be getting off social media and starting a blog or a podcast in 2021. I’ll read and listen.

We must express ourselves regularly away from the feeds. Lockdown has turned the dials on this for many people and I sense a lot of momentum and energy. I can’t wait to see where it leads.

There’s a lot more that I’d like to say about this year. About making this show, about writing and blogging in general. About selling my first sci fi story, and writing a novel. So I’ll talk about that in my usual end of year blog post. I’ll round up my favourite albums of the year too at some point between now and new years.

Speaking of the the blog. I’ve also got a lot of unfinished posts in my drafts. Considering the goals I set myself last year for 2020. This is either a good reflection of my productivity, or an utter failure.

Lastly

You can now find most of the scripts for past shows in an archive on my blog. I’ve realised how useful it is to have the ideas fixed in text, and not locked up in audio. I should have listened to you folks who told me to post them back in 2018. Having a body of work online has become a source of pride, satisfaction and even a source of some surprise.

The 2020 script document for the show has over 52k words in it. Once this episode is online, I will have published over 4 hours of material.  If you include the essay This is it – over 5. 

Thats a lot of my dulcet tones. So I’m going to give you all a break, and I’ll be back for episode 2101 on the 8th of Jan. 

So thank you again to everyone for listening. A spacial shout out to those of you who have chosen to support the show financially. I really appreciate it. The show continues to grow and my creative endeavours are breaking even. I couldn’t be more thrilled.

Speak to you next year, thanks agin.

Be well.

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

The post EOY 2020 | 2050 appeared first on thejaymo.net.

NYE was good.

We have hosted a party at ours the last couple of years. This year however was at a friends place. We began the evening with some friends who had come over by drinking shots of Irish Moonshine – Poitin or Poteen – However we english decided to spell it.
Then we ate dinner together, had some more shots, and went to the party.

To be honest I really don’t remember much else after that. I had a good time tho. The good news I didn’t go blind. Tho I may have been temporarily – I didn’t take any photos at the party.

I was thinking about doing some kind of hopes and dreams for the new year, mixed with a review of last year kind of post. But it’s not what I ended up doing. Today I just a random mix of things I wanted to post online.

I want to blog more in 2020, post more content here like essays etc. I want to see what kind of personal website this can become. Owning ones archive is really important.

Regular weeknotes will begin again from next week. More blogs per week begin from today.

Jan 1st 2020 marks for me the decade anniversary of giving up using soap and shampoo. I wrote about it a few years ago. My thoughts and experience haven’t really changed that much. Tho I do moisturise a lot more now I’m in my 30’s.

I’ve noticed that there’s quite a few posts and vloggers talking about the ‘not by any new clothes for a year’ challenge. It’s even on the RSA blog. I wrote about my experience of not buying any new clothes in my 2012 end of year review.

In Numbers

Blog: 37,513 words
Podcast Scripts: 38,442 words
November Nanowrimo: 50,873 words
Books (Non-fiction WIPS) (x3): 154,700 words
Fiction: 61,145 words
Diary: 63,056 words

Music Tracks: 14 (All unfinished)

Podcast Downloads: 14,980 (Ex Youtube)
Zine Downloads: 2,840

Blog Views:

These are the yearly views for the last decade. I couldn’t get it to show 2010 which was 6 views. I think moving this blog to my main website is something I should have done 2 years ago when I decided to start bloging again to be honest. But ah well.

My most successful post this year was the one shortly before Christmas on starting a blog. It has cropped up in all sorts of places online.
My zine also influenced a number of people this year and folks have written about it on their Blogs in a way that has been sometimes really touching.
My most successful podcast by a looong way this year was this one on ritual and storytelling. It seems to have gotten a lot of traffic from community collage moodle boards or whatever.

In/Em Bodiment

2019 was a wild ride. With some extreme lows, creative highs, blissful moments, loving moments, new friends and old friends and traveling..

2019 was the year I finally crawled out of the the 2.5 year long depressive slump that has felt like I’ve been wading in quicksand at various degrees of intensity. I know how I am. I have about 5 years to absolutely smash out my life before the dog comes again. Though with changes i’ve made to my life and lifestyle we’ll see.

I also came off one of my Crohn’s Disease medications that I’ve been on since 2002, and I’m extremely healthy and weigh the most I ever have in my life.

I lost my mind a bit more meditating this year – great stuff

Learning to live inside my own body is probably a theme that will be remembered across western culture for the twenty teens decade.

In My Own Labour

I did some fun work this year but not enough of it that paid well.. or sometimes at all tbh.

My talks list is up-to-date on the home page. I really enjoy public speaking, as always I hope to do more.

I am really proud of all the creative things I’ve worked on this year – in fact 2019 might have been the most creative year I’ve ever had. Despite it being tempered by my depression. I have a lot of unfinished work that needs sorting out and sculpting for online consumption and hope to get a lot out.

In addition to setting some fixed creative ambition goals in 2020 I’m going to be focusing on getting more freelance work. This website now I have it is part of that strategy.

I feel like I may have hemmed myself in with the post numbering situation in the title on this blog. I think I’m going to continue to number them, but only the weeknotes posts. Other posts won’t be numbered (like the PRESS) ones or they will just Blog/ or Post in the header image. This will solve some of the mental hangups I’ve had about whats next over her and allow me to post stuff more than once a week.

In Books

All my 2019 books read are here on goodreads Add Me! https://www.goodreads.com/user_challenges/14846995
As you probably all well know… it’s mostly WARHAMMER 40k and Dune. lol

I made a list of all the books I want to read this year. once they are out the way I’m going to start bingeing on pulp noir/hard crime novels.

In Photos

Have a good 2020. Your Attention Is Sovereign.

The post 2019 appeared first on thejaymo.net.

December 22, 2019

|

Permanently Moved 🔊 | Year End 🎆

S2E38

Wrapping up the year. Remember: It’s up to each and everyone of us to bring light to the world.

See you in 2020.

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

Website: https://www.thejaymo.net/
Podcast: http://permanentlymoved.online
Zine: http://startselectreset.com

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EOY 2019

Well, that’s this year done. 38 episodes. Nearly every week from when I restarted after my travels in early 2019. Asia and Australia already seem like a lifetime ago. 

I’m not sure when this episode is going to even make it online honestly. There’s been no internet in my flat for 3 days so far. With no indication of when it’s going to be fixed, maybe Sunday, maybe Monday. But I’ll post it the first opportunity I get to connect my laptop to the full fat internet. The outage was caused by a catastrophic incident involving a foundation drilling machine catching the main fiber trunk for south west London. It basically wrapped the cable around and around the drill bit pulling it out of all the equipment at the exchange. I’ve seen photos on twitter and it’s pretty wild. Anyways. 

First of all: I’d like to say thank you to you all for listening this year. 

It was 18 episodes ago during episode 1920 when I did the episode 50 sprint review. At that time I said the podcast was closing in on the psychologically significant number of 10,000 all time downloads and I was excited about it. 

Now at the end of this year, I think this little one man band of a podcast will be closing out 2019 with about 15,000 downloads this year alone. So thank you so much again to everyone that is listening. 

If you know anything about podcasting as an industry there’s two metrics that people talk about. Depending on who’s counting. If you get 127 or 156 downloads in the first 30 days of an episode launching that puts you in the top 50% of all podcasts in the world. Permanently Moved now clears both those numbers in the first 72 hours which is remarkable. So I thank you again and again to everyone who is listening. 

In addition to making this podcast Issue one of my zine, start select reset has been downloaded over 2.5 thousand times since I put it online in september. Which is also remarkable. 

It’s not all about the numbers obviously. But I do think its important to share them as we’re away from the metric’d and gamified world of social media. 

What’s far more important is that there’s lateral conversation between peoples blogs and projects. It’s about forging connections. I don’t think there’s anything more pleasurable than web surfing a well linked blog post.

Longtime listeners and friends will know that I started making this show to see if I could win the battle against the ‘perfect is the enemy of done’ tendencies I’ve always struggled with. After two years making this show, and also 2 years of blogging weekly, at the end of 2019. I am pleased to report that I’m largely over it. 

I’ve made some shows this year that I am extremely proud of, others are ok, and there’s a few that I’ve quite frankly kinda already forgotten about. You probably have too. But that’s all part of it. It’s something that I’m now ok with and getting used to it. I’ve never been in this position before. 

I’m not going to be labour the point as I’ve spoken about it. I don’t know how many times, but the only way to ‘get gud’ is to get practicing. 

What is interesting to me right now is what’s next. I did a todo list episode back in September 1925. On the space weather I said “What gets done between now and December will become the new normal in your life” it set the stage as it were for Jupiter In Cap. I’ve set myself some interesting ‘new normals’. 

Looking back at the script for that episode. Of all the things I talked about wanting to do, i’ve half finished 4 of them. 

With the turning of the new decade, and the optimism that always comes with a new year, I’m wondering what’s next. What new year’s resolutions or behaviour changes would i like to change or improve next year? 

The main thing next year isn’t so much about executing, but about delivering. 

I have mountains of things that aren’t finished that I’ve started this year, and 2020 as an astral theme is applying hard graft to deliver the dreams and ambitions of Jupiter . Which is a roundabout way of saying I need to try much harder to finish things. In my professional life with skills and training in project management and business operations I am very good at getting people to deliver. In my personal life not so much. The new normal is to continue making and creating things that bring me joy. But also the new normal has to be that I finish and deliver other things I’m investing energy into. You might disagree, but in my mind there is absolutely no point in creating things if they are never going to see the light of day.

That is the main thing I’m going to focus on next year creatively. Is to finish what I start. Being more disciplined with my time and energy and directing towards things I enjoy. What I don’t enjoy is spending hours and hours on social media watching the world scroll by. 

On that note.

The world around us is going to get way way worse before it gets better. So my other resolution for next year is to make sure that i’m only focused on doing things that bring me and others around me joy.

It’s up to each and everyone of us to bring light to the world. To chase the shadows out wherever we find them. It might be gloomy outside in the world but the time spent with others in personal relationships should be 

Hope you have a good one. Speak to you next year.

The post EOY 2019 | 1938 appeared first on thejaymo.net.

Its March but it feels like the new year.

We got back from our grand tour a little over a week and a half ago. Life is already back into full swing. It is nice to be approaching familiar tracks and paths with new eyes.

If you were close enough to me to be following along on instagram you know that Eve and I had a lovely time. Asia and Australia (especially Indonesia) are places that I never thought I’d go. So the whole trip had an added kind of surrealism wrapped around it.

I remember seeing a thing on Blue Peter once as a kid. About how the water goes down the plug hole in a different direction in the southern hemisphere – and it blew my mind. The first thing I did on arriving at the AirBnB in Indonesia was to turn the tap on and witness it for myself. A Miracle. A wonder of nature. It’s always the small things.

Permanently Moved

301 – 1901 – 1000mph club

This is literally just me talking about going away and getting back from my holiday. New year same old me. Trying to ease back in to making this.

Notes: Occulture Podcast – Solarpunk

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

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

Dipping the stacks

The People Who Eat the Same Meal Every Day

(Literally me. I eat the same breakfast everyday for months sometimes years on end)

California family furious after hospital uses video call to tell grandfather he’s dying

Why It’s Important to Consider Whether Dune Is a White Savior Narrative

The Ministry

I’ve been encouraged by a few people I admire and value in private conversations since I got back to publish, publish everything, push all ALL the content.

It is apparently vital that I stop waiting for the threads of the future come to me and push out things to make the hustle of what i want to do with my life viable. With this in mind I’m going to do so.

I’ve been extremely worried – perhaps since the earliest stacktivism days – that publishing things that i think and believe on the internet is going to get me canceled. This is the main reason i haven’t ever just pushed out content at pace. The other reason is as an artsy person/under student the one thing that I feel university should have taught me (to ditch perfectionism) didn’t.

But its 2019 and I have so much to do and get done. The only option is to push stuff out and move on. Only Forward.

In other news I was on an episode of Occulture Podcast talking about SOLARPUNK with Gordon White from Runesoup recorded whilst staying with him in deepest darkest Tasmania in Feb.

Reading

I’ve read 16 Books so far this year. 5 Of them Dune Novels. I will also be writing a review of Thus Spoke The Plant v.soon. TLDR is its one of the best books i’ve read this side of the year 2000

My Goodreads profile is below:

Music

Holly just announced the release of her new album and released the newest single. I can’t wait for this. Holly, Mat and everyone else involved has been working on it for a long time. Can’t wait!

Pop Princess Kim Petras has two singles that came out since I last posted. One Featuring SOPHIE the other being a Power Pop Banger. Both embeded below:

Remember kids:

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