Hoist The Mainbrace!

9 minutes
thejaymo.net Blog header post 111

I went back to Thanet this week to see my parents and go to the dentist. Iā€™ve been dealing with (what I thought was going to be) some proper bullshit with my wisdom teeth. I was idly thinking one night whilst dealing with the pain that perhaps I have too much wisdom..or not enough. Either way my dentist told me to just suck it up until it becomes a problem or unbearable. THEN he’ll deal with it. Fair enough.

I didnā€™t take many photos whilst I was at home. One I did take is in the header image. We went and bought veg for dinner in the Saxon Barn thats been a farm shop forever.
I did go to the Turner Center in Margate to check out the turner prize nominees. They were alright I guess. I know who Iā€™d vote for.
We also went to a family friend’s birthday lunch. I ate the most enormous pudding I think I’ve ever seen as an adult. It was called ā€˜Hoist the Mainbraceā€™ and I ordered it because the menu said the words ā€˜WOWā€™ at the end of its description. It wasnā€™t wrong. WOW.

WOW. Here’s me being extremely happy about the whole thing. WOW

Self Hosting

So. I have been over here on thejaymo.net blogging for 5 weeks now. I still keep finding small things that need doing/tweaking on the website. Spelling mistakes, adding extra info to add on the projects pages etc. For example: The other day I realised I hadn’t added my zine to the projects page!

I was thinking that I might make some changes around here. I am incredibly lucky that I have a bit of press that I need to add. But I don’t think Iā€™m going to number it as I have done on previous press entries. The numbered posts should only really apply to the weekly blogs.

Given that Iā€™m also thinking of publishing my podcast to a separate category at some point in the future – probably from next year. Iā€™ll remove the podcast section from this week notes type post. 
This also would mean a few things open up. Iā€™ll be able to have broken down category pages on the site (EG Press) but also do more with the site in general. Of course the main RSS feed will be full fat – but im not sure people will mind.

I do really like how some homesteaders on this blogging archipelago post photos etc to their blogs with titles etc. Iā€™m thinking in particular, Paul Graham Raven at velcro city and Warren on the leaning towards death site. 

Instagram/whatsapp etc is bringing in the combined inbox next year. Which feels like a betrayal, and an unwanted side load into the whatsapp ecosystem which I have thus far resisted. If I’m going to have to find a new place to post images. Then Iā€™d like them to be on my blog. 

Its funny, quite a bit of my old early 20ā€™s cyberpunk militancy has crept back in to how I engage with the internet. That 20 year old in 2005 would be horrified I wasnā€™t using linux. I’m no where near my 20yo self yet, as im too sucked in to google as a platform. Though I did recently turn off a lot of the google ā€˜featuresā€™ on my pixel3 that Iā€™ve been using on and off in the last year.
They donā€™t really add anything really to my life other than the satisfaction (for example) of being in the top 10k google maps local guides. Why? Why did I have all this surveillance turned on and then make it even better and more accurate by rating and reviewing places? Doing Admin for a huge multinational corporation is Bananas – why did I bother?. That said, the huge fight I had over email with the local computer repair shop after I gave them a bad review was a laugh – But I digress

Now I have this website I might as well control all aspects around it. I know I’ve written and spoken on the podcast but I think that this is the way forward and feel like i’m getting a jump on the trend.

I was saying only recently to someone that I reckon more and more creators are going to abandon Patreon etc and just run their own subscription service / card payment processor on their websites. Cut out all the middleman entirely. (That said both well known processors sting you for *most* of fees that services like Patreon charge you anyway).  Iā€™m not saying that Iā€™m going to set up my own donation box here, but I do think people running their own sites as a central hub will become more and more common as people drift away from the vertical feeds of social media and possibly third parties like Substack and Patreon.

On the other hand, running your own website isn’t all fun and games. In the last 5 weeks I’ve had to deal with all sorts of weirdness. A stalled PHP service on my server that was crashing image uploads was a bit of a headache to debug and sort out. It has also taken me far more time than Iā€™d like to admit to tweak my cache settings and page load speeds. I am happy to admit that I’m now getting a 97 score on google page speed insights tool.

The mobile page however is not so good.. and i’m getting to the limits of my CSS and JS optimisation. Especially as the theme is dynamic, if I improve my mobile score impact my desktop score. I basically have no idea how to get the load above the fold css content to work correctly. *shrug* mobile pages loads aren’t that slow. 

Anywoos. I’m sure the novelty of being a ‘web master’ will probably wear off by the end of the year.

Permanently Moved

(CW) Depression

S2E34

Recorded in the freezing cold on the sea wall at Saint Mary’s Bay Broadstairs. I talk about the accuracy of words and our completely lack of vocabulary when it comes to describing the experience of depression.

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

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

This is another one of those personal episodes that sits alongside the ones iā€™ve done about experience. Or as personal as my ā€˜what would your Teenaged self think of youā€™ episode. Iā€™ve had some lovely notes from folks already saying that it was a great episode.

Iā€™m going to Manchester next weekend and will be off grid. So i’ve lined up a guest host next week! looking forward to it.

Dipping the Stacks

ā€œBest Friends Forever Donā€™t Existā€

The 9-year journey to explore each of EVE Online’s 7,805 solar systems | PC Gamer

This is The End, the club that changed London | DJMag.com

A Trips Festival for the Digital Age – The Long Now Foundation – Medium
Shareing this as it includes a VERY generous quote from the panel i was on at Sonar+D. And… Long Now sharing my work? HELL YEAH!

The Ministry

This is a stupid image macro I made went semi-viral (for me anyway) on twitter earlier this week. I made it to take the piss out of the man that thinks Labours free broadband plan is going to lead to gulags or whatever. But the sentiment and the image works so well that I has kinda taken on a life of its own. (I even saw it in my solarpunk heavy feed on tumblr – lol). I’m sharing it here cos I consider it ‘work’.

Everything Is Horribly Brutally Possible

I found out earlier this week that one of the work email aliases I use has been broken for at least 10 days to 2 weeks. I was waiting to hear back from some freelance work that I was actually really excited to do and get paid for. So that’s probably not happening nowā€¦ le sad. (Being your own webmaster sucks)

Iā€™ve been plugging away at Nanowrimo in all the various headings that I set myself at the beginning of the month. Sadly 23 days in and Iā€™ve only put about 5k words into the section that I was hoping to use as part of my next zine. (For reference the last zine was 5k words but I’m hoping #2 will be bigger) I need to wildly speculate in that part of the document some more!   

I have written a few things about meditation that I quite like however. 

I have found myself falling into some kind of Warhammer 40k novella which its odd. I didnā€™t want to write much fiction this nanowrimo as I have so much nonfiction writing. BUT the words keep coming and itā€™s a strong idea so I’ll keep going.

Been spreadsheeting a bit more for PROJECT NOVA. From next week I may be taking over their Instagram to post memes for the next 3 or 4 weeks. Going to try and get their followers up to 20k or more. I reckon its doable – with engagement.

Reading

Iā€™ve been super busy this week.

I havenā€™t finished a single book. Perhaps for the first time this year? Anyway. I think I’m about an hour away from finishing the first book in Dan Abnett’s: Gaunt’s Ghost series as part of the omnibus of the first 3 novels. Heā€™s been writing this space war/soap opera for nearly 20 years, so there are a lot of books ahead of me that I can steamroller my way though.

Music

The new Hana Track: Satellite is v.good. I text a friend who is a producer on Monday morning saying that it was a fantastic piece of synthpop/synthwave. Catchy and etherial, its great.

Remember Kids:


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