This is only the second time I have written words for the dead on here. The first was for Eriol, another member of the Rune Soup community, whose death Gordon announced to us at the end of 2019. I didn’t really know what to say then, or how to say it, and I do not know what to say now.

I heard the news just like everybody else on the 13th of May. And I’m not going to lie, it sent me spiralling for weeks. Someone I had known and spoken to almost every single day for a quarter of my life was gone. During that first week, I read the immense outpouring of grief, gratitude and inspiration from people whose lives he had touched, including beautiful tributes from Peter at Scarlet Imprint, JDO and Avalon Cameron.

I cannot give an account of Gordon’s whole life, or even of the person everyone else knew. This is an account of my Gordon White. The catty, cringey wizard who changed the course of my life, and the friend I miss.

My thoughts are especially with James, Gordon’s family, and all those who loved him most closely. I still cannot quite believe he has gone from this realm.

A Recent Dream

A few days before the announcement, I had a dream.

I was in a white box gallery space with a dusty, dirty, polished concrete floor. I was sitting on one of those stackable chairs with a hole in the back, in a circle with my closest friends and co-conspirators. We were at some kind of meeting or event, deep in heated debate. About the world, about culture, and about the future. There were so many great people sitting around the circle, and in the dream I thought it strange that Gordon hadn’t made it.

In the unfolding of the dream, there was a lot of back and forth about politics, the environment, AI, and the nature of intelligence. During the dream, frustrated at what everybody else was saying and the materialist background assumptions in the conversation, I felt the urge to speak up. I told everyone what I thought. Not what I believed, but what I know and intuit to be true about the nature of things and the universe. A revelation amongst close friends, of how much of a crazy weirdo I am. When I woke up, I felt relieved, unburdened, and perhaps even rejuvenated.

A few days later, the announcement arrived that Gordon White had died. I understood the dream and what comes next.

The Cringey Wizard

I first met Gordon in person in my late twenties, although I had been reading Rune Soup since at least the early days of the Whisky Rant. We became mutuals online when he was shitposting about needing magical spells involving beer, and I sent him a Mesopotamian ritual for removing a fallen meteorite from one’s property.

We had been DMing on Twitter for months before we finally met in Soho one afternoon. I had just successfully landed a job after an interview at the startup that would eventually give me a mental breakdown. That first meeting turned into an afternoon of day-drinking in Fitzrovia, moving from pub to pub for lunch. We sat in the sun and talked about magic, meditation, permaculture, and conspiracy theories. We got on like a house on fire. I was deep into The Esotericon and Portals of Chaos at the time, and we were comparing notes. I got the impression that I was the first person he’d met that was doing the whole working.

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

The bitch would just never admit that he was wrong.

About.
Anything.
Ever.

You could pull out your phone and prove beyond doubt that he had misremembered some point about Tolkien lore or whatever, and he would just announce that he had been “directionally correct” and move on, and never mention it again. Warhammer lore was the sole exception, on that, he always deferred to me.

From that first meeting, we spoke basically every single day on Google Chat. Him with his bullshit media job, and me with my bullshit startup job. At the same time, he was finishing the two books that would become The Chaos Protocols and Star.Ships, working constantly and burning the candle at both ends. His drive was astonishing, both inspiring and worrying. He seemed constitutionally incapable of doing anything by halves, including work, exhaustion or relaxing.

On Gchat we talked about our practice, what was going on in the Occult world, and recommended each other what books to read. I don’t think he ever quite got over my total lack of interest in film or television. In those years before Brexit and his Bilbo’s birthday vanishing act, our time consisted of impromptu afternoon beers and after-work trips to the British Museum, the V&A, and the National Portrait Gallery. We would sit in the medieval galleries looking at paintings and reading out a biography from Butler’s Lives of the Saints or Wikipedia, having a good laugh as we pondered the English saints and the altarpieces.

When The Chaos Protocols and Starships came out, I was there, pleased for my friend, that he was happy and in his element, being crowned “the dark prince of modern Chaos magic” and basking in the triumph of having published two books back-to-back.

At one point, we went to an event in North London, a pub meet up. A meeting of minds of spiritual seekers and conspiracy theorists. This was still back in the “before times,” when interest in such things were still counter-cultural rather than morally objectionable.

The cab ride home was, as he later put it, unnecessarily confusing. The driver had failed to reset the trip charge in the app. So Gordon woke up the next morning to a £120 bill, essentially having paid for my leg of the journey home as well. In return, he demanded a bottle of fancy rum and would never let me forget it. During the ride, we talked about Rune Soup and his future plans, both for the newsletter that became the All Red Line and what would eventually become RuneSoup.com as we know it today: the magic school.

When we next met up on a random Saturday for another epic, all-day drinking session, the rum debt was paid. I thanked him for mentioning me on his blog writing about the event. He laughed, making a comment about Google juice, and something about hypertext and “Breadcrumbs for the future.” My own goal in life he knew, has never been to be a main character, but to be well-indexed in other people’s stories.

The title of that first post where he mentioned me on his blog was “Always Go Full Wyrdo“.

I knew the sentiment was aimed specifically at me. Advice he would repeat to me for the rest of our friendship. We had a perennial conversation throughout our boozy, in-person relationship about being public about one’s spiritual practice and saying what you believe online. True to form, he was unapologetic. He argued that one should set aside worries of social ostracism; if one is invincible, as he put it in The Chaos Protocols, then none of that matters. I disagreed, and in important ways still do, believing that one’s Great Work is a private matter between oneself and the universe.

It was at that pub garden in the sunshine, that a group of extremely loud and obnoxious Americans once sat at our table. Almost as if to demonstrate the act of being true to oneself, Gordon proceeded to talk loudly and animatedly with them for twenty minutes about how his favourite movie of all time was Flubber. He went on and on in detail about the plot, and how Flubber should make them (the Americans) feel proud and so patriotic to come from a country that could produce such a work of art. He talked about Flubber non-stop until they fucked off to another table.

He turned to me with a smug look of triumph, and I told him it was pure cringe and that I couldn’t believe he just did that. But he was genuinely offended that I’d called him cringey, and maintained from then on that I thought it cringey to be his friend. It became a running joke: my refusal to go full weirdo was bound up with avoiding being cringey. He on the other hand was the king of cringe.

It was in that same pub garden on a frigid winters day that he told me he was leaving. Later he arranged to perform his Brexit vanishing act after his talk at the Occult Conference in 2016, and it was a secret I couldn’t tell anybody for obvious reasons. As the clock ran down, we went for drinks and smoked on pub terraces. We discussed the reception to Star.Ships and speculated over dinner about Guinevere Petzinger’s First Signs. Meanwhile, the Google Chat conversations and Twitter GIF wars continued.

Around the same time, one of those long, boozy conversations became my essay Seeing Through the Debris. Gordon’s ideas and writing run all through it, as they still do. My most recent episode, Monsters in the Mirror for example. The method remained fruitful for the rest of our friendship: throwing models at one another until something gave way and the world looked different.

At the conference in 2016, I met the Scarlets properly for the first time, and outed myself as an Enya fan in their most august company. The day after, I went back to North London for his leaving drinks with close friends and old housemates from his time in London. Throughout the time when he was in London, I had maintained that I wouldn’t get him to sign copies of his books for me because I knew him personally, so why bother? But that morning, I balked. I brought them with me and made him sign them; a snap decision I am now intensely grateful for.

As he signed the books in a quid pro quo exchange, he said: “I’m doing this for you, so you need to do something for me.” From his backbag, he produced a trapezoidal package wrapped in the most exquisite Japanese style, covered in sigils, alongside a wax-sealed envelope with a date, time, and location written on the front. He told me, “I need you to go to this place, at this time, open the envelope, and say the words inside, then throw it all into the Thames.”

Which of course I did.

The Visitor at the Farm

And so, he was gone.

I thought perhaps I would never see him again. Our relationship turned into a digital crossover of a few hours: my early mornings and his late evenings. We discussed his work on the membership and the courses while he was still living near the Hawksmoor and looking for the farm. We exchanged permaculture video links and worked our way thought writers such as Eduardo Viveiros de Castro and Eduardo Kohn, passing ideas back and forth and trying to work out what they meant for magic, ecology and the way a person ought to live. I would wake up in the morning, see his messages from overnight, and respond, and then I would get a reply in the late evening my time if I was still awake.

There are traces of those conversations all through the Rune Soup archive. More than a few episodes begin with Gordon or his guest saying, “I was just talking to Jay” or with Gordon mentioning that I had made the introduction or suggested the topic. I never appeared on the show itself due to cringe, but I was often somewhere just off-mic.

I remember the morning he messaged to say that he had found the farm but had some reservations. I told him that if the place felt right, he and James should pull the trigger. They did.

In 2019, my girlfriend and I organised the first of our grand adventures: Singapore, several weeks in Bali, followed by several more travelling around Australia, including a visit to see Gordon and James on the farm in Tasmania. I still remember being in paradise, staying in a beach hut in Bali’s National Park, when the news of the Tasmanian bushfires arrived in a message from Gordon. As the days passed, the fires spread. We later flew from Bali to Cairns, then Sydney.

While we were in the jungle in northern Australia, the Vāsuki dragon ritual was being devised. I followed the preparations on my phone on patchy WiFi. Several days after the ritual, on the morning we were due to fly to Tasmania, I received word from Gordon that the decisive rain had arrived after days of lighter showers. Reports on the Australian news followed: an unexpected deluge had dampened the fires in southern Tasmania. We flew out of Sydney even as a member of the cabin crew warned us that they were uncertain whether we would be able to land in Hobart. Smoke from fires elsewhere still raging had reduced visibility.

But we landed, and there he was outside the airport, waiting by his ute in his stupid mirrored sunglasses, shorts, and a slightly dishevelled shirt. He looked blessed and shell-shocked at once. Still coping with the ordeal of the fires, and the intensity of having served as the focal point of a vast ritual. Still trying to comprehend the magical implications of the exact quantity of rain required to break the emergency. And so I became the unnamed old friend who arrives in chapter five of Ani.Mystic. Gordon had left me as a breadcrumb inside his story.

He collected us that Thursday morning, his car still packed with books rescued during the evacuation, and together we drove back into the valley. We arrived at the farm, beat its bounds, and looked over the future permaculture plans. I spoke to the party tree. James cooked on the barbecue. We talked about the wonders of rice cookers. I drank and smoked my way through untold amounts of rum.

We drove through apocalyptic, fire-scarred forest, the smell of ash and smoke heavy in the air. We walked Gordon’s favourite beach and we recorded a joint interview about Solarpunk. If you have ever wondered about Gordon’s view from the old office space, it looked like this:

Beneath the stars on our last night, we talked about visions, our mental health, where we stood with our work, and of course the ancestors. Throughout those days, I was acutely aware that I was with him and James in the immediate aftermath of a local apocalypse. One that had been averted by a miracle. It felt like a great privilege even then. It feels even more so now.

After we returned home, and with Gordon’s encouragement, I continued to go all in on making Permanently Moved, a project that was as much a magical working as a piece of creative work. After episodes dropped, messages would arrive: “I know what you think. Why didn’t you go further or say what you really think?”

Small Apocalypses

Later in 2019, Gordon left for his first trip to the Peruvian jungle. On that first dieta, he was with several mutuals of mine, all of whom, helped open the path he would walk for the rest of his life. For the next few years, he churned out an astonishing amount of work: Weekly shows, blogs, card decks, the membership courses, on top of the farm chores, and a social life both on and offline.

I would tease him endlessly about the absolute state of his endless god-awful haircuts in his videos, which I called the “Groomsoup Review”. I also pushed him to see how far he would take the soy-face thumbnails, back when that was still the YouTube meta. This masterpiece of a crop remains my favourite.

The first week he was in danger of missing a Rune Soup upload, he asked me to come on the show as an emergency guest. I refused, still not prepared to go full wyrdo. He made some remark about being my cringey friend. Later, during the pandemic, after his broken heart, he asked me to host the show. I told him the show didn’t matter. He did.

In March 2020, he returned to London for Avenging Angels, and the Food Forest talk at Treadwell’s. We met the moment he arrived, and that night was the last time I got completely fall-down drunk. Somewhere in the course of the proceedings, Dr Jack Hunter dropped out of the event because of COVID, and I agreed to step in.

My head and practice was full of prayer, and we spoke for hours about our the shared Christian inheritance. After an ill-advised round of cocktails, we ended up back at his Airbnb. He gave me a bottle of rum from Melbourne; I gave him a Victorian map of Chiswick, the London neighbourhood where he had lived with James, and the namesake of their farm in Tasmania. Then I staggered home. I spent the rest of the week with severe bruising on my hip and grazes all down my elbows and forearms after falling over on the crossing on my walk back from the station.

On the day of the Treadwell’s event, we sat with the Scarlets in the pub, watching the dystopian, early pre-lockdown verhoeven-esq branding being adopted by the BBC. We talked about the Wuhan labs and joked that, from now on, we should only ever see each other in person on the brink of, or in the aftermath of, small apocalypses.

Although I enjoyed the event, I regretted not going full wyrdo in front of an audience who would understand. Those who were there, or have watched the recording, you can now read my ”100 Notes on Storydwelling” for something a little closer to what I wish I had said. Print zine edition coming soon.

During the pandemic, Gordon went through his cancellation, and he was angry that I did not publicly support him. He was right to be. I told myself that my friendships are private, that public declarations were not how I conducted my relationships, and that I did not want to be pulled into an online conflict. But beneath all of that was a deep fear of the mob. It was an act of cowardice on my part that I deeply regret. His being my cringey, crazy friend had ceased to be a joke between us.

Our daily communication dropped off after that, but the friendship survived. It gathered strength again during his ‘medical event’, and the uncertainty of his recovery.

We mostly talked about our favourite plant-based recipes and broccoli. Then he began spending his winters in South America and going on adventures again. I have so many video tours of his Airbnbs, and voice notes of him bitching and moaning at length about chaotic bureaucracy and lost luggage whilst showing me around the places he was staying.

When he was in South America, the time difference allowed for late-night Zoom calls rather than asynchronous chats. Mostly about the terrible state of online media culture, but also progress with ‘the work’. On one of those jungle trips, he had his ‘Enochian experience.’ The encounter with the laughing being full of golden light. He messaged me. We talked about awakening, about the event, compared notes, and then he asked me what to expect next.

After he moved from blogging to Substack he would tease me about being like the last soldier on the isles of blogging, fighting the last war, posting to an internet that was over long ago. When he finally got on Instagram, going in hard on the WitchTok numskulls, I was all in. Even during this final catty elder era, while he was remastering all the membership courses, I told him he worked too hard. Earlier this year, however, the tone of his stock replies changed. We all have a limited time on Earth, he said, and we need to do the work we are here to do.

“Do the things that need doing.”

News of the Departure

The news that he had died on one of his adventures was shocking. But never has a man been so prepared for what was to come next.

What made Gordon’s work so powerful was not simply the magic. He treated the occult as a serious way of knowing and acting in the world, inseparable from history, ecology, politics, place, ancestors and the practical business of building a life. He had no patience for a disenchanted universe, or for the idea that spiritual practice should remain safely decorative. Again and again, he insisted that the world was stranger, more alive and more negotiable than modern people had been taught to believe. His work gave people permission to take that possibility seriously.

He leaves behind an extraordinary body of work. Taken together, the courses on RuneSoup.com may constitute one of the most important modern grimoires we have, and I suspect his influence among Western practitioners will be measured in centuries.

A few weeks ago, I was in London for lunch with a friend. We ended our time together with a toast to Gordon’s life. I went to the spot on the bridge where I had made that offering a decade before. I honoured the “old man” and the “flower of cities all” that he loved so much. Then I announced aloud that Gordon White was dead. As I did, the wind whipped up and the clouds rolled in. I spoke to the river and to the city about Gordon. It was their entanglement, and our shared infatuation with both, that had allowed Gordon and I to meet in the first place. Then I spoke about my own relationship with London, what I wanted now, and where I was, and the blessings I was asking for.

As I walked away, thunder rumbled and the rain began. On the train home to South London, the sky was apocalyptic with lightning. I saw hundreds of flashes in the span of minutes outside the carriage window. When I got off the train at my destination, it was over, and the sky was clear and shining once again.

Then, when I stepped through my flat’s door, my partner said, “You have to see this,” and took me to the kitchen window. At almost the exact time I had been on the bridge talking to the city, she had seen the brightest flash and heard the loudest boom of her life. A lightning bolt had destroyed my neighbour’s back wall.

Not exactly a subtle omen.

Gordon believed that words like “rest in power” and “live on in our memories” were curses placed upon the dead: “the blackest of black spells”. I will not ask him to remain here for our sake. He has places to go and things that need doing.

I know that at any time, I could call him up through the mirror, or pull him through the cards, and I believe others out there already have. But were I to do so, it would begin the same way as so many of our conversations did when I needed something from him: “Bitch, I’m busy. What do you want now?”

My friend Gordon was pure hot fire. His influence on the last quarter of my life, was immense and full of meaning. He encouraged me to do more, go deeper, say what I really think, fly my freak flag, and go full wyrdo. That influence has not ended with his departure to the Western Isles. He changed my life, enriched it, and made it so much more than it would otherwise have been. I miss him greatly, and I am deeply grateful.

Even now, weeks on, I occasionally wake wondering whether Gordon has messaged me overnight. The thought passes through me as I pick up my phone, followed by a sudden pang of sadness. For ten years he told me to stop hiding, so this is me, finally, trying to take his advice.

In the words of the greatest cultural mage of our era:

Sail away, Sail away, Sail away.

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The Future Arrived in June

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

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

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

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

Inside Model Land

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Photo 365

Terminal Access

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

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

Reading

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

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

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

Stephen Wilson Jr – Preachers Kid (Single)

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

Anyways he has a new single out. Its amazing.

Remember Kids:

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

Taste As Interface Behaviour

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

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

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

Taste is an interface behaviour

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

Aroesti writes:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Terminal Access

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

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

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

Reading

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

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

horsegiirL – Nature Is Healing (LP)

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

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

Remember Kids:

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The Backrooms as Permissive IP

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Movie Is Downstream From The Folk Art

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

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

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

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

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

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

Backrooms (2026)

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

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

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

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

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

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

Bedroom Tools

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Protocal Art

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

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

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

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

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

Experience.Computer– Van Neistat

https://experience.computer/

IN THIS EPISODE

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

Also in this episode:

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

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

• Visualising to find lost items in physical space

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

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

On The Blog

May 2026 | Photo 365

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

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The Ministry Of My Own Labour

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

Terminal Access

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

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

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

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

In other news RIP John Blanche

Reading

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

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

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

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

JYOCHO’s – Singles 26 (EP)

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

My favourite single on the EP is Strong Body.

Remember Kids:

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

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Daily Averages

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

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

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

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

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

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

*interesting*

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

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

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

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

On The Blog

AI-Generated Interfaces and the Delamination of Application UI

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

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Photo 365

The Ministry Of My Own Labour

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

Terminal Access

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

It’s so good you should deffo read it.

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

Reading

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

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

EXUM – In Russia. A is 9 (LP)

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

Remember Kids:

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Towards the end of my post back in march about the near future of agents I mentioned possible changes to the architecture of how Application and UI interact.

Once that hard layer is built into applications and websites, something happens to the way software operates. The UI stops being the only control layer, and becomes the human layer only. The app and the interface become completely divorced.

This idea has basically been the working hypothesis across a number of the group chats I’m in for at least the last year. Over time I’ve been exposed to a great deal of manic experimentation and discussion about this trajectory from some of the best designers I know.

The clearest signs however that the UX layer is actually delaminating from the application layer came this week at Google I/O with their announcement of Gemini 3.5 Flash-powered Google Search results. In real time, an agent will wake up inside of Google’s code-harness software Antigravity, and dynamically build an interactive page of search results similar to the hypertext objects I describe here. You can see the process demonstrated in the keynote below, I’ve queued it up:

Google has been gesturing at dynamic interface generation since the original Bard era; but the most recent I/O made it feel like a real product direction. I’ll also note, that prompting the search box to give you 10 blue links is *exactly* the kind use case that Google want you to use it for!

There are a whole bunch of terms being used describe these kind of dynamic front ends right now, I like On-the-Fly UI (OTFUI), but I’ve also heard: Liquid UI, Disposable Interfaces and Runtime Artefacts used in conversation as well.

The Great Delamination

Another place you can see this kind of Liquid UI/UX emerging is on dedicated AI hardware that has a fairly constrained action dictionary. For example, the much maligned Rabbit R1 recently got a massive software update to Rabbit OS 2, and it lets you vibe code apps using text to speech:

Matt Webb is also exploring drag and drop / dynamic UX and software interfaces for AI hardware too at his most recent venture.

Another example can be seen from Manuel Odendahl in this this video where he demos “disposable software“, inspired by Apple’s original HyperCard:

And my friend Ramon Marc has been been exploring dynamic front end interaction patterns for non technical users recently and came up with this last week:

It’s an imagined middleware layer that takes a short intent from the user as a text input, and “Double Diamonds” the idea: exploring what would / could be possible from the limited prompt and then constrains it back down to a set of options and questions to show back to the user to clarify / select and confirm before it generates the actual app.

I kept iterating on unfolding intent to see how it could feel in more practical flows, so this is an evolution of [[sxk4bapy|folding intent]].I kept iterating on unfolding intent to see how it could feel in more practical flows, so this is an evolution of folding intent. The core idea stays the same: a prompt is an intent. It gets translated into a function ([[30bptv1y|inspired by Agentic Algebra]]), which produces a JSON tree, where each leaf is a UI paradigm for more granular user input. I kind of think we’re getting into territory where we can make more contextual, hard interfaces with this. Think: I want pizza from place xyz takes the intent, pulls context from the pizza place, and builds a UI based on the tree and availability.

There is another iteration here, that walks though the intent and surfaces the permissions for the user to grant before execution. Based on the principles of hardness. The goal being that vibe coding liquid UI apps is made simple to users who don’t know anything about coding at all. (more on this further down the post)

So… if UX is going to delaminate from applications, one of the things we need to think about is the speed at which these front ends can be conjured into existence by the bot. In RM’s demo video, you can see the token counter coming in at around 60 tokens per second (tok/s) and the UI taking 22 seconds to generate.

Google’s new Gemini 3.5 Flash model comes in at around 300 tokens a second depending on connection time and latency so if at 60 tok/s, RM’s demo takes 22 seconds, At 300 tok/s, the same token budget takes about 4.4 seconds. But during the Google I/O keynote, they showed off an internal Gemini model running at 1,500 Tok/s. Which is 25× faster! Using the same example this becomes 0.8 seconds. Essentially meaning the UI generation becomes instantaneous.

Iron Speciation Triangle

Given this seems to be an observable trend, I’m pretty sure this is the direction of travel. So we should probably take a step back, and zoom out, to talk about model development in general.

Years ago now, I wrote about “maximal intelligence at all levels”. Local models, cloud models, frontier models, etc, will all speak to one and shunt tasks up and down depending on capability and speed requirement.

General-purpose models like Claude Mythos, the next ChatGPT and Gemini models, are all going to carry on getting better as they have been. I think however, over the coming months, and definitely in the next 18 months or so, we are going to see a speciation of AI models.

We already see the first signs of this with the difference between thinking models and instant models, and also in the open source world where small and extremely performant coding models are being developed. But these are only the embryonic versions of the coming split. There is a lot of headroom to be found by keeping intelligence roughly steady while pushing speed, cost, latency, and availability into completely different regimes. It seems obvious and logical that the major labs will go further than they already are, and will produce different models specialised for different tasks alongside their general purpose build-the-machine-god frontier models.

Imagine for a moment that this time next year there’s a model that isn’t appreciably more ‘intelligent’ than the one you are using today. But it’s extremely cheap, and very fast. As fast, if not faster, than the 1,500 Tok/s model we know Google already have internally.

If we take the classic iron triangle of quality, speed, and cost, but for our purposes we’ll use intelligence for quality. We can pick two and work our way around the triangle to speculate on three distinct future species of machine mind:

• Fast and Intelligent, but not Cheap: These already exist in a way, with both Anthropic and ChatGPT offering ‘fast modes’. These will get used for real-time agents, and developers in high-stakes coding environments. But also high-frequency trading, and tasks that require extremely performant multimodal interaction: robotics, security applications, and even surgery in healthcare. Maybe they are dispatched by general models with a one-off agentic task. They are really fast and intelligent, but you just burn money using them.
• Cheap and Intelligent, but not Fast: This is the kind of use case that we are seeing emerge with Claude’s new “dreaming mode”—batch minds that can be left to run overnight, reading things, doing background memory-consolidation, auditing codebases, simulating and generating reports, planning, and doing deep research. Useful for the kinds of jobs and applications that you don’t necessarily need to run in real time. Tasks that you can wait on.
• Fast and Cheap, but not Maximally Intelligent: This is the baseline model I’ve already explained being used for instantaneous UI generation.

All three of these model species would of course, require vastly different architectures at the data centre level: hardware and memory optimisations, and so on. Also important to note, as a lot of people miss this: The literal, physical substrate that LLMs run on evolves and changes to meet the needs of the software design of the model. These kinds of model species will emerge as more data centres get finished up and more compute becomes available.

Runtime Sovereignty

Beyond the data centre, we also have to consider the emerging ASIC chips for AI, where models are essentially baked onto the chip. Taalas recently entombed Meta’s old Llama 3.1 8B in silicon and achieved speeds of nearly 17,000 tok/s. If a chip like that were running a model intelligent enough to execute the example above, which Llama 3.1 8B is not, the same operation would take about 78 milliseconds or 0.07764706 seconds. 283.3× faster than RM’s demo experiment.

Whilst these kinds of fixed chips can’t be updated or changed, if we end up in the near future with “good enough” intelligence running locally, and insanely fast, then these kinds of Liquid UIs might end up being generated on the edge by the hardware/physical interface. Sort of similar to what I was thinking about when I first wrote about Helpful LLocal Models last year.

If we get this kind of local improvement then the iron triangle becomes a square and sovereignty becomes a new variable. Local actions won’t necessarily be performed by the smartest minds, but they do live on your laptop or phone and are optimised for latency, privacy, persistence, and ownership etc.

In addition to open source coding models, you can already see other kinds of specialised models tuned for speed and subject matter starting to emerge. OpenMed, a terminal-native clinical agent explicitly engineered around strict local compliance, and data sovereignty. Using MLX it clocks 24–33× speedup on standard Apple Silicon for local privacy filtering. OpenMed is a real breakthrough showing that a clinical AI can now live entirely inside hardware that a small local clinic can actually own, inspect, and govern. Note: these things can run on iPhones and iPads too at very usable speeds.

As the capabilities of local models increase, we’ll see all sorts of new agent types emerge, ones that run tasks as batch processes overnight. Very similar to the way that the iPhone has run its machine learning over your photo library for the last decade. Local models will be able to tag, process, read, and summarise all your local files, photos, and documents on the device and produce embeddings for them. Imagine being able to search Spotlight for “recent invoices from X” or “that spreadsheet about Y”.

In a maximal-intelligence-at-all-levels world, the winner wins by proximity

Constitutional Software

With liquid runtime artefacts, the question becomes: who is allowed to generate them, where, with what data, under what rules, and on whose behalf? This is of course a question of governance.

Once interfaces are generated on demand, and actions are distributed between cloud models, local models, specialist models, and device-level agents, the interface is no longer the boundary of the application. It’s a membrane between user intent, available context, permissions, model capability, and machine speed. All of this will require a great deal of what I call hardness.

“What can this software do?” becomes: “what is this software allowed to do?” Which model is allowed to see which data? Which actions must stay local? Which decisions require explicit permission? Which agents can speak to each other? Which layer gets to say no?

It’s all very complicated and will need a lot of governance. In the group chat Rafa has been calling this design space constitutional software.

What rules or protocols govern the generation of the UI. Which screens, tools, agents, and actions may appear and under what circumstances. There is a great deal of future work required if it’s going to become bullet proof.

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Telephone

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Photo 365

Terminal Access

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

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

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

Reading

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

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

Castle Rat – The Bestiary (LP)

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

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

This band RIPS!!

Remember Kids:

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Just Sad

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

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

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

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

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Photo 365

Reading

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

Parlour Greens – Emeralds (LP)

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

Remember Kids:

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Jubensha Con

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Super cool day out!

On The Blog

April 2026 | Photo 365

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

SSRZ15: Monsters in the Mirror

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

Buy on Etsy

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

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

Photo 365

The Ministry Of My Own Labour

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

Terminal Access

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

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

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

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

Reading

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

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

Chiminyo – NRG 5 (LP)

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

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

Remember Kids:

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

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

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Turnstones

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

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

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

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

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

SSRZ15: Monsters in the Mirror

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

Buy on Etsy

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

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

Photo 365

The Ministry Of My Own Labour

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

Terminal Access

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

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

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

Reading

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

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

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

Denonbu – Ultrarhythm (Single)

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

Remember Kids:

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Nearly Doable

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

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

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

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

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

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

Buy SSRZ15: Monsters in the Mirror on Etsy

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

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

£18 + shipping worldwide

Buy on Etsy

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

On The Blog

Raindrop.io Stella Prompts for Batch Processing Bookmarks

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

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

Start Select Reset 📑

Subscribing to SSRZ supports my online work and creative projects.

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

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Photo 365

The Ministry Of My Own Labour

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

Terminal Access

WEDDING PLANIC!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Reading

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

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

Bassekou Kouyate – Miri (LP)

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

Remember Kids:

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

Issue #015 of Start Select Reset went out by snail mail yesterday to my supporters (£5/month+).

Issue #015 – Monsters In The Mirror

Issue #15 is the physical shadow of the audio essay of the same name.

It is an essay about artificial intelligence and cultural mirrors; mirrors as magical surfaces, instruments of mastery, and habitats. It turns on the transistor as a second Promethean moment, asking what it means to live inside the mirror and coexist with entities that wear language as their skin.

This print edition includes the full essay transcript, plus a new introduction and afterword written exclusively for the page; material that does not appear in the audio version.

Buy SSRZ15: Monsters in the Mirror on Etsy

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

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

£18 + shipping worldwide

Buy on Etsy

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

Production Notes

Well. It’s nearly the end of April, and I have now completed the full end-to-end production cycle for both Permanently Moved and Start Select Reset in their expanded, more ambitious, quarterly forms.

I wrote a bit about the state of the production process a month ago, just after the audio essay came out. At the time I was mostly thinking about the writing, recording, editing, and launch sequence. Now the physical zine has also gone out to subscribers, I feel like I’ve finally completed the whole loop. That loop has been about 5x five times more work than I expected. lol

But, as I wrote back then, the whole thing has been a learning experience, and I’m not going to beat myself up about that. The first time through any new production process is always ugly as you don’t know which parts are going to be easy until they turn out not to be.

In the end, I’m really pleased with how the zine turned out. Going with print.work as my printer was an excellent decision, their customer service is fantastic, and the quality of the finished object is really good.

Originally, when I was thinking about the new format, I thought moving to A5 was going to be the main change, and use that going forward. But now I’ve used them as my printer, I can see there is so much more I could do: square booklets, landscape booklets, posters, all sorts of things. The new range of possibilities this opens up is actually quite inspiring.

To cap off this zine launch, here are some of the first-time things I have had to learn, navigate, or bodge my way through for both the podcast and the zine:

• Long-form writing: thinking, structuring, and delivering 8,000 words as one continuous audio essay.
• Long-form audio editing: finding efficient ways to cut, shape, and polish something at that length.
• Zine layout: wrestling with rivers of text, alignment, and typographic changes that did not break the whole document.
• Print production: interfacing with printers and navigating the Easter holidays, which I had completely forgotten about.
• Etsy: setting up the shop and getting the listing live.
• Royal Mail Click & Drop: completing shipping and customs labels inside a truly byzantine user experience.
• The post office ladies: arriving with 50+ international envelopes that all needed to be scanned individually for customs reasons, and because I don’t have a business account I didn’t have a single manifest QR code.

But you don’t find out unless you try. And having now tried; I can see the shape of the process much more clearly. The next one will be smoother because I now know where the friction lives.

Permanently Moved

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

The post Start Select Reset Zine #015 | Monsters In The Mirror appeared first on thejaymo.net.

Raindrop.io recently released Stella, an AI assistant for searching, organising, and summarising bookmarks. I’ve been using it to work through nearly 18 years of saved links, and the experience of chatting with my bookmark archive has been surprisingly great. In some situations, it has even replaced mindless doomscrolling, especially in the little moments like waiting in a supermarket queue.

At first I was using Stella for simple library maintenance; cleaning up duplicate tags, fixing spelling mistakes, merging related tags, and dealing with the sheer inertia of a tag collection that has been accreting since del.icio.us. Lately, though, I’ve been getting more ambitious: processing my read-but-unsorted bookmarks and moving the good ones into my public feed at links.thejaymo.net.

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

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

Both process five oldest bookmarks at a time, stage the proposed changes for review, and let you confirm everything before updating your library. One is a heavier, more explicit prompt with plenty of guard rails; the other is a shorter, lighter version that is less prescriptive.

If you found this page looking for a Raindrop.io Stella prompt, an MCP example, or a better workflow for organising bookmarks, this should be a useful place to start.

Heavy Prompt

UPDATE – 26 April 26: Update to specify API feature names in addition to the MCP tool calling, to make the prompt more reliable and robust.
UPDATE – 7 May 26: Update to Phase 5+6 to make appearance of user facing Approve button in the app UI more reliable in certain circumstances.
UPDATE – 20 May 26: Removes Phase 6. Phase 5 updated to instruct Stella to process prepared bookmarks sequentially rather than update in a single payload. Improves updating bookmarks reliability. – V5

# Stella Bookmark Workflow Prompt
Use the MCP bookmark tools to complete this workflow from discovery through preview. Do not apply changes until I explicitly confirm.
## Objective
Find the 5 oldest bookmarks in my Raindrop Unsorted collection. Treat those bookmarks as the fixed working set for this run. Analyse each bookmark individually, propose note, tag, and collection updates, then show one combined preview and wait for confirmation.
## Tools
Use only:
- `find_bookmarks`
- `fetch_bookmark_content`
- `find_tags`
- `find_collections`
- `update_bookmarks`
## Hard constraints
- Do not call `update_bookmarks` before explicit confirmation.
- Do not fetch content for more than one bookmark at a time.
- Do not fetch all bookmark contents up front.
- Do not add, replace, reorder, or mutate bookmarks in the working set unless I explicitly ask.
- Preserve discovery order through preview and update.
- Treat each bookmark as a sealed unit: do not compare bookmarks or mix passages, notes, tags, titles, URLs, or collection decisions across bookmarks.
- Never add quotation marks around extracted passages.
- Flagged changes require explicit confirmation by bookmark number and item.
## Internal state
Maintain:
- `working_set`: fixed bookmarks from Phase 1
- `tag_vocabulary`: existing tags from `find_tags`
- `target_collection`: verified `thejaymo` collection and its `_id`
- `proposals`: one stored proposal per bookmark
- `skipped`: bookmark indexes excluded by user
- `flagged`: proposed changes requiring explicit confirmation
Do not mutate `working_set`.
## Phase 1 — Establish working set
Call `find_bookmarks` once using Raindrop API semantics:
- `collectionId: -1`
- `sort: created`
- `perpage: 5`
- `page: 0`
This means:
- `collectionId: -1` = system Unsorted collection
- `sort: created` = created date ascending / oldest first
- `perpage: 5` = return 5 bookmarks
Do not use `collection: unsorted`, `limit`, or `sort: oldest first` unless the tool explicitly maps those aliases to the Raindrop fields above.
Store the returned bookmarks as immutable `working_set`, preserving returned order. If fewer than 5 are returned, use only those.
Each item must retain:
- index number
- bookmark id
- title
- URL, if available
- existing note, if available
- current tags, if available
- current collection, if available
Titles in previews must come from `working_set` metadata, not fetched page content.
## Phase 2 — Preflight vocabulary
Before analysing content:
1. Call `find_tags` once for the existing tag vocabulary.
2. Call `find_collections` once to verify `thejaymo` exists and record its `_id`.
If `thejaymo` does not exist, continue analysing but mark every collection action as:
`Collection action: ⚠️ Flagged for review — collection thejaymo was not found`
Do not create collections unless I explicitly ask.
During analysis, use existing tags wherever possible. If unsure whether a subject tag exists, call `find_tags` with a targeted query for that bookmark’s concrete subject.
## Phase 3 — Analyse bookmarks sequentially
Process bookmarks in `working_set` order.
For each bookmark, finish all steps before fetching the next bookmark:
1. Reset temporary passage, note, tag, collection, and flag variables.
2. Call `fetch_bookmark_content` for this bookmark only.
3. Read only this bookmark’s content.
4. Extract one key passage.
5. Prepare the note field preview.
6. Propose 3 to 7 tags.
7. Decide the collection action.
8. Store the proposal keyed by bookmark index.
9. Move to the next bookmark.
Each proposal must include:
- `index`
- `bookmark_id`
- `title`
- `url`
- `key_passage`
- `note_field_preview`
- `proposed_tags`
- `collection_action`
- `flagged_items`
## Key passage rules
Extract exactly one key passage per bookmark.
The passage must:
- be contiguous text from that bookmark only
- preserve exact wording
- be no more than 100 words
- preferably be a full paragraph
- contain no quotation marks added by you
- remove leading or trailing quote/block formatting only if it is source formatting
Prefer the strongest buried passage over the obvious lede, in this order:
1. counter-intuitive beat
2. thesis sentence or paragraph
3. sharp statistic or data anchor
4. buried irony
If no usable passage exists, set:
`Key passage: ⚠️ No usable passage found — [reason]`
Do not invent or substitute content.
## Note rules
Prepare the note update for the current bookmark only.
If a key passage exists:
- put the passage at the top
- do not paraphrase it
- do not wrap it in quotation marks
- if the existing note is empty, the new note is just the passage
- if the existing note contains text, prepend the passage, then one blank line, then preserve the existing note exactly
If no usable passage exists, use an article subtitle only if appropriate; otherwise leave the existing note unchanged and flag the note update.
Do not write the note update until confirmation.
## Tag rules
Ask: what is this bookmark materially about?
Propose 3 to 7 tags in this priority order:
1. concrete subject
2. close subject
3. broader subject
4. lens/context
Use existing tags wherever possible. Precise subject tags beat loose general tags, even if the precise tag has lower usage. High-count tags are tie-breakers, not replacements for the subject.
Do not omit the concrete subject in favour of abstract tags.
Only propose a new tag if no suitable existing tag exists. Mark it:
`#new-tag ⚠️ new tag for review`
Use lowercase, hyphenated style where appropriate.
## Collection rules
Default:
`Collection action: Move to thejaymo`
When applying this move, use the verified `thejaymo` collection `_id` as:
`collection: { "$id": target_collection._id }`
Flag the collection action instead if the bookmark is:
- highly personal or private
- sensitive
- paywalled with no usable excerpt
- too time-sensitive to age well
- unsuitable for public curation for any clear reason
Use:
`Collection action: ⚠️ Flagged for review — [reason]`
## Phase 4 — Combined preview
After all proposals are stored, show one combined preview.
Do not apply changes yet.
Do not call `update_bookmarks` yet.
Use this exact format for each bookmark:
### Bookmark [n]
Title: [title copied exactly from working_set]
Key passage: [exact passage, maximum 100 words, no quotation marks]
Tags: #tag1 #tag2 #tag3
Note field preview: [exact text that will be written to the note field]
Collection action: [Move to thejaymo OR flagged action]
If title is missing, use:
`Title: ⚠️ Missing bookmark title — [URL or bookmark id]`
After all preview blocks, output exactly:
`Confirm? Reply yes all to apply everything, no all to cancel, skip [n] to exclude a bookmark, or [n] edit [change] to amend a specific bookmark.`
## Phase 5 — Confirmation and apply
Valid commands only: `yes all`, `no all`, `skip [n]`, `[n] edit [change]`,
`yes all + [n] [change]`. Treat ambiguous replies (`yes`, `looks good`,
`go ahead`, `do it`) as invalid; ask for an exact command.
Applying = calling `update_bookmarks`. The client's native approval prompt
appears as a result of that call; it is not a separate step to request or
wait for. So on any apply command, calling `update_bookmarks` is your first
action, before any prose; do not stall or hand back beforehand.
- `yes all`: apply proposals strictly one at a time, in working_set order.
  For each: call `update_bookmarks` for that one bookmark, wait for the tool
  result, then proceed to the next. Never emit more than one `update_bookmarks`
  call before its result returns. After the last, report what changed.
- `no all`: change nothing, call nothing.
- `skip [n]`: drop bookmark `n`, reshow the combined preview.
- `[n] edit [change]`: revise bookmark `n`'s proposal only, reshow the preview.
- `yes all + [n] [change]`: amend bookmark `n`'s proposal, then proceed as `yes all`.
`yes all` excludes flagged collection actions, flagged note updates, and new
tags; each needs separate confirmation by bookmark number and item.

Shorter Prompt

# Stella Bookmark Workflow Prompt
Use the MCP bookmark tools to complete this workflow from discovery through preview. Do not apply changes until I explicitly confirm.
## Objective
Find the 5 oldest bookmarks in my Raindrop Unsorted collection. Treat those bookmarks as the fixed working set for this run. Analyse each bookmark individually, propose note, tag, and collection updates, then show one combined preview and wait for confirmation.
## Tools
Use only:
- `find_bookmarks`
- `fetch_bookmark_content`
- `find_tags`
- `find_collections`
- `update_bookmarks`
## Hard constraints
- Do not call `update_bookmarks` before explicit confirmation.
- Do not fetch content for more than one bookmark at a time.
- Do not fetch all bookmark contents up front.
- Do not add, replace, reorder, or mutate bookmarks in the working set unless I explicitly ask.
- Preserve discovery order through preview and update.
- Treat each bookmark as a sealed unit: do not compare bookmarks or mix passages, notes, tags, titles, URLs, or collection decisions across bookmarks.
- Never add quotation marks around extracted passages.
- Flagged changes require explicit confirmation by bookmark number and item.
## Internal state
Maintain:
- `working_set`: fixed bookmarks from Phase 1
- `tag_vocabulary`: existing tags from `find_tags`
- `target_collection`: verified `thejaymo` collection and its `_id`
- `proposals`: one stored proposal per bookmark
- `skipped`: bookmark indexes excluded by user
- `flagged`: proposed changes requiring explicit confirmation
Do not mutate `working_set`.
## Phase 1 — Establish working set
Call `find_bookmarks` once using Raindrop API semantics:
- `collectionId: -1`
- `sort: created`
- `perpage: 5`
- `page: 0`
This means:
- `collectionId: -1` = system Unsorted collection
- `sort: created` = created date ascending / oldest first
- `perpage: 5` = return 5 bookmarks
Do not use `collection: unsorted`, `limit`, or `sort: oldest first` unless the tool explicitly maps those aliases to the Raindrop fields above.
Store the returned bookmarks as immutable `working_set`, preserving returned order. If fewer than 5 are returned, use only those.
Each item must retain:
- index number
- bookmark id
- title
- URL, if available
- existing note, if available
- current tags, if available
- current collection, if available
Titles in previews must come from `working_set` metadata, not fetched page content.
## Phase 2 — Preflight vocabulary
Before analysing content:
1. Call `find_tags` once for the existing tag vocabulary.
2. Call `find_collections` once to verify `thejaymo` exists and record its `_id`.
If `thejaymo` does not exist, continue analysing but mark every collection action as:
`Collection action: ⚠️ Flagged for review — collection thejaymo was not found`
Do not create collections unless I explicitly ask.
During analysis, use existing tags wherever possible. If unsure whether a subject tag exists, call `find_tags` with a targeted query for that bookmark’s concrete subject.
## Phase 3 — Analyse bookmarks sequentially
Process bookmarks in `working_set` order.
For each bookmark, finish all steps before fetching the next bookmark:
1. Reset temporary passage, note, tag, collection, and flag variables.
2. Call `fetch_bookmark_content` for this bookmark only.
3. Read only this bookmark’s content.
4. Extract one key passage.
5. Prepare the note field preview.
6. Propose 3 to 7 tags.
7. Decide the collection action.
8. Store the proposal keyed by bookmark index.
9. Move to the next bookmark.
Each proposal must include:
- `index`
- `bookmark_id`
- `title`
- `url`
- `key_passage`
- `note_field_preview`
- `proposed_tags`
- `collection_action`
- `flagged_items`
## Key passage rules
Extract exactly one key passage per bookmark.
The passage must:
- be contiguous text from that bookmark only
- preserve exact wording
- be no more than 100 words
- preferably be a full paragraph
- contain no quotation marks added by you
- remove leading or trailing quote/block formatting only if it is source formatting
Prefer the strongest buried passage over the obvious lede, in this order:
1. counter-intuitive beat
2. thesis sentence or paragraph
3. sharp statistic or data anchor
4. buried irony
If no usable passage exists, set:
`Key passage: ⚠️ No usable passage found — [reason]`
Do not invent or substitute content.
## Note rules
Prepare the note update for the current bookmark only.
If a key passage exists:
- put the passage at the top
- do not paraphrase it
- do not wrap it in quotation marks
- if the existing note is empty, the new note is just the passage
- if the existing note contains text, prepend the passage, then one blank line, then preserve the existing note exactly
If no usable passage exists, use an article subtitle only if appropriate; otherwise leave the existing note unchanged and flag the note update.
Do not write the note update until confirmation.
## Tag rules
Ask: what is this bookmark materially about?
Propose 3 to 7 tags in this priority order:
1. concrete subject
2. close subject
3. broader subject
4. lens/context
Use existing tags wherever possible. Precise subject tags beat loose general tags, even if the precise tag has lower usage. High-count tags are tie-breakers, not replacements for the subject.
Do not omit the concrete subject in favour of abstract tags.
Only propose a new tag if no suitable existing tag exists. Mark it:
`#new-tag ⚠️ new tag for review`
Use lowercase, hyphenated style where appropriate.
## Collection rules
Default:
`Collection action: Move to thejaymo`
When applying this move, use the verified `thejaymo` collection `_id` as:
`collection: { "$id": target_collection._id }`
Flag the collection action instead if the bookmark is:
- highly personal or private
- sensitive
- paywalled with no usable excerpt
- too time-sensitive to age well
- unsuitable for public curation for any clear reason
Use:
`Collection action: ⚠️ Flagged for review — [reason]`
## Phase 4 — Combined preview
After all proposals are stored, show one combined preview.
Do not apply changes yet.
Do not call `update_bookmarks` yet.
Use this exact format for each bookmark:
### Bookmark [n]
Title: [title copied exactly from working_set]
Key passage: [exact passage, maximum 100 words, no quotation marks]
Tags: #tag1 #tag2 #tag3
Note field preview: [exact text that will be written to the note field]
Collection action: [Move to thejaymo OR flagged action]
If title is missing, use:
`Title: ⚠️ Missing bookmark title — [URL or bookmark id]`
After all preview blocks, output exactly:
`Confirm? Reply [y] yes all to apply everything, no all to cancel, skip [n] to exclude a bookmark, or [n] edit [change] to amend a specific bookmark.`
## Phase 5 — Confirmation
Only these commands are valid:
- `[y] yes all`
- `no all`
- `skip [n]`
- `[n] edit [change]`
- `yes all + [n] [change]`
Ambiguous replies such as `yes`, `looks good`, `go ahead`, `update them`, or `do it` must not trigger updates.
Behaviour:
- `[y] yes all`: apply all approved, unskipped, unflagged proposals
- `no all`: cancel without changing anything
- `skip [n]`: exclude that bookmark, then show the updated combined preview
- `[n] edit [change]`: revise only that bookmark’s stored proposal, then show the combined preview again
- `yes all + [n] [change]`: apply all approved, unskipped, unflagged proposals, including the stated amendment to bookmark `n`
`yes all` does not approve flagged collection actions, flagged note updates, or new tags. Flagged items require explicit confirmation by bookmark number and item.
## Phase 6 — Apply approved changes
Only after valid confirmation, call `update_bookmarks`.
For each approved bookmark, apply only its approved changes:
- update the note field with that bookmark’s approved note text
- update tags with that bookmark’s approved tags
- move it to `thejaymo` only if approved
Do not update skipped bookmarks.
Do not apply unconfirmed flagged changes.
Do not modify anything outside the fixed working set.
If notes or tag sets differ, update bookmarks separately or group only bookmarks whose approved payloads are exactly identical.
After applying changes, return a concise summary of updated, skipped, and still-flagged bookmarks.

The post Raindrop.io Stella Prompts for Batch Processing Bookmarks appeared first on thejaymo.net.