Past Years / New Gear | 2030

|

S03E30

Mid year goal reviews, New Gear, Broken Gear and Two Recommendations. 

Links:
TSASE: https://tossedsaladsandscrambledeggs.substack.com/
This is Fine: https://newdesigncongress.org/en/pub/this-is-fine/


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


Past Years / New Gear

Hello! It’s absolutely baking here in London today. It’s going to be something like 34 degrees later so I’m trying to get this show made and out the door early. Mainly so I can open the window. I have to close it when i’m recording due to the perpetual screaming of kids outside in the square (see episode 20-15) for more info. 

I think the past two episode’s I’ve made have been alright – don’t you think? In fact I think some of the Episodes I’ve made this year have been some of the best so  far.

I’m in a bit of an odd position with the script for today’s show. As of last week you all now know the process or steps to make an Episode. Well annoyingly this week i’ve spent a lot of time thinking about what i’m going to say *next week*.

Where we’ll be celebrating episode 100. Not to spoil anything but I’ll be making a sprint review like I did for episode 50. Digging in and reflecting. Which should be interesting for me anyway. 

Annoyingly, being preoccupied with next week has left me without much of an idea for the show today. Even now as I’m making this type this my brain is itching to move back to the commission writing that I’m on a deadline for. I also have a short audio piece for a webzine to record but I’ll make that at the weekend when it’s not so melting hot. 

How’s this episode sounding by the way? Eve bought me a fancy studio boom arm mic stand for my birthday. I’m standing up to record this. It’s my first time standing since 2018. Back then I had a cheap amazon basics mic arm that literally fell apart under its own weight and shoddy construction. So it feels different and yet familiar to be recording like this right now. 

I’ll note that the input volume levels are set considerably lower than usual. Which isn’t surprising as I can literally feel how much more open my diaphragm is so I must be speaking much louder. 

As I said on my blog I’ve been using this week to review my New Years and Mid Year plans from old notebooks and set up a new list of priorities for the remainder of 2020. As medium term goals from 2018 have now become short term plans. I have also I’m pleased to say, done all the items on the list in Episode 20-18. I might talk a bit more next week about why but Pt 2 of my 411 Episode ‘this is it’, is indefinitely on hold. I have a lot of materials for visionary mode recorded and I was hoping that I’d have several episodes of that out by now, but c’est la vie.

My list reviewing has also gone right back though notebooks from the best part of the decade. A few old ideas have been pulled out. Being a musician at heart I’ve always had ideas for audio projects. But now at 35 I finally think I’m old enough and ugly enough to think about attempting some of them.

In other news, the up and right arrow keys on my 2015 macbook pro have given up the ghost and stopped working completely. As someone that works in spreadsheets, produces a lot of text and whose main musical creation tool is the tracker Renoise I cannot even begin to explain to you all how annoying this is. Like.. it severely impacting my quality of life. I can’t spell for the life of me, so not being able to easily hit the up arrow in a chat program to edit and correct a mistake is infuriating. I’ve kinda stopped bothering. Much to some of my friends chagrin. 

Speaking of friends. I’d like to point you towards two things before I sign off today. The first. Old buddy old pal, Huw Lemmey has added a second newsletter to his growing media empire. You can and should support his writing with a subscription to his weekly newsletter Utopian Drivel which can be found at Huw.Substack.com. But this week he’s just started Tossed Salads and Scrambled Eggs. A newsletter about the sitcom Frasier, delivered to your inbox one episode at a time.

You can subscribe at tossedsaladsandscrambledeggs.substack.com Link in the show notes. He’s up to episode 7 of season 1 so far. So not too much to catch up on and follow along. It’s shaping up to be a daily read for me. Despite the fact I don’t recall having seen an episode of Frasier all the way through ever. Huw’s attachment to the show and thoughtful literary writing covering the psychodynamics of the characters, the class dynamics and also the influence of the contemporary 90’s neoliberal consumerism embedded in the show has been really interesting so far. I hope Huw self publishes the whole project as a book once he’s gone the full 264 episodes. 

The second recommendation is the essay This is Fine: Optimism & Emergency in the P2P Network by Cade Diehm of New Design Congress. The good man was previously mentioned here in episode 20-03.

One of the killer lines in the piece is the following:

The resilience of centralised networks and the political organisation of their owners remains significantly underestimated by protocol activists. At the same time, the decentralised networks and the communities they serve have never been more vulnerable. The peer-to-peer community is dangerously unprepared for a crisis-fuelled future that has very suddenly arrived at their door.

This Is Fine – Cade Diehm

If you are interested in Peer to peer networks, decentralised technologies or web communities then this is the essay for you. Good writing on this topic is rare so should be sought out and shared whenever it shows up. 

It’s already stiflingly hot here standing mere inches away from a blanket. I’ll speak to you next week.


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

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