If you are one of folks that follow this blog via email – I hope that slowly post by post the layout of the email that arrives in your inbox is improving.

I know all the buttons and some of the embeds from the blog have been super broken for…ever? WordPress/jetpack updated recently and it seems to better replicate and respect the blog posts editor settings.

I’ve noticed that emails look cleaner, so I’m tweaking things every post to see how the look each time. Testing email layout isn’t something I can really do under my set up.

As much as I encourage everyone to start a blog. There’s a reason web2.5 middle host services like Substack and Patreon (and to some extent wordpress.com) are so popular….

Self hosting is hard – really hard..

I am technically savvy enough, but there are currently all sorts of unexplained errors and bugs happening on the back end of my wordpress install right now and I have no fucking idea how to go about fixing them. For a long time (for some un explained reason) my blog was producing 8-10 unnecessary image size variations for every image I uploaded. Which ballooned the size of the site on the server. I’ve sorted that out, but still need to delete a lot of redundant static files.

Plus my theme hasn’t been updated by its designer since 2020. It’s now creaking at the seams with all the new elements, settings and blocks as part of the Guttenberg editors development. But it does show that themes built for WordPress blocks and then not touched is robust. Blocks are the future of the web – without a doubt.

I really want to rebuild the front end of the site with WordPress’s full site editor – essentially future proofing it. But the scale of that task is… large. If I paid someone it would be expensive..

At some point I might just nuke the way the site looks and start from first principles? I’d loose a lot of functionality but maybe that doesn’t really matter? In my head the future front page of this blog looks more like a magazine.

Ahmet over at Weird and Deadly Interesting recently updated to a FSE blog layout and his site looks great! He’s future proofed, he can tinker away.

Self hosting is hard – really hard. It’s also really expensive.

Between website hosting, the podcast, and the amount of paid supporters I have – I’m in the liminal zone.

An online creator who wants to self host, but is too big for free service tiers but not big enough to totally justify the business grade tier technology I either have or need to adopt to move things forward.

For example – I really want to upgrade the back end email architecture of this site so I can do more with subscriptions and newsletters etc. Newsletter glue or something.

I also want to adopt a more robust membership platform – probably with woo commerce. I really want to sell IRL stuff and ship physical things to paid supporters.

But when you add up all the various bits and pieces of technology I’d need to pay to achieve that (and jenga block together) … I’d be loosing money on my internet pursuits with no indication that it would be worth it/or get more paid supporters having shelled out the money. A weird situation.

Theres a reason people use Patreon I guess?

Chatting with a friend in a similar situation to me about all this and they said to just double down, create, make and post. So maybe I’ll just do that?

In less blogging about blogging news, I went to 123-V yesterday. A vegan restaurant just off Bond Street tucked away in the basement of Fenwicks. Best sushi I’ve ever had in London! Check it out if you are ever in town!

Photo 365

I’m not above posting feet picks on the internet lol.

I twisted my ankle outside St Pancras Station on Bank Holiday Monday. Fucking killed.

Spent most of Tuesday hopping about and keeping it elevated. I could walk on it Thursday and now today its just bruised and sore to the touch.

I definitely wouldn’t want to turn it again in the near future though – I think damage would probably be permanent.

Permanently Moved

Web Surfin’ UXA

After you reduce your social media intake. You need to re-learn how to use the Internet.

The Ministry Of My Own Labour

• Some awesome and really interesting calls!!
• Finished up my zine essay – printing next week.
• Researched audio equipment / did the deep dive on zoom recording devices, lavaliere and shotgun mics for a new project.
• Re-affirmed my commitment to finish what I start. Life Is … passing me by.

Dipping the Stacks

The 10,000-Year Clock: A Monument To Long-Term Thinking

The 10,000-year clock is neither a ‘frightening’ ‘distraction,’ as its critics scorn, nor the ‘admirable objective’ its fans claim. It’s something else — a monument to long-term thinking that can unlock a deeper and more thoughtful spirit of interpretive patience.

Digital VTubers Like FeFe Are Becoming Fuckable Realities [NSFW]

Beloved anime VTuber FeFe doesn’t have a physical body, yet she still managed to release a pocket pussy her fans are going wild for. But who, exactly, are they fucking if FeFe doesn’t actually exist?

The Rise of the 9 p.m. Work Hour – The Atlantic

When we say “That meeting should have been an email,” we’re not just saying “My boss wouldn’t stop talking.” We’re also saying “I think the information from that synchronous event would have been more productively shared as an asynchronous communication, so that an hour of necessary work wasn’t shifted later into the workday.”

Transistorized! The History of the Invention of the Transistor – Home Page

This archived 1999 PBS website describes history of most important invention of the 20th century:

Aqua’s ‘Barbie Girl’: An Oral History of the Bizarre 1997 Hit – Rolling Stone

The lawsuit had 11 different claims. They pretty much threw the kitchen sink at us. They all boiled down essentially, in one way or another, to trademark infringement. They even claimed that they infringed on what they called ‘Barbie Pink.‘

Reading

I’m still reading James Bridles Ways of Being. I tend to ‘go slow’ when I’m reading a book that I know is going to be important in/to wider culture. I also know that the hardback is totally sold out everywhere – so its definitely going to be influential if penguin miss judged the first print run.

I started listening Scott Westerfeld’s newest and last (so far) book in the young adult Uglies universe Youngbloods. Youngbloods is the 8th book and merges the two Uglies and Impostors series storylines. I can’t belive I’ve been reading these books since I worked in a bookshop in 2007. Bonkers. Really looking forward to this denouement. If a little bittersweet.

After finishing Dungeons and Desktops I pulled up the next book in my huge kindle pile of shame. I’ve just stared reading 1998’s Crystal Fire: The Invention of the Transistor and the Birth of the Information Age. I’m about 10% in so far. It was recommended to me as THE book about the invention of the transistor. Oh boy is it that. After the introduction, and general overview of the three men who shared the nobel for their invention, chapter 1 jumps back in time to the mid 1800’s The discovery of Crystal Rectifiers and the X-Ray. At the same time the narrative weaves the lives of the grandparents and parents fo the men who discovered the transistor in context to developments in chemistry and physics.

Like I said, I’m only 10% of the way in but I already sense I’m gonna be recommending this book to everyone. lol

Music

thejaymo.net Spotify Playlist

Never Stop Texting Me – More Eaze · Claire Rousay

With the April sun shine providing a bit warmth to the air – turns out the thing I didn’t know I needed to accompany the season was Never Stop Texting Me, a collab album between More Eaze + Claire Rousay.

At first listen you may think this a 2022 post pandemic lo-fi hyperpop album, taking queue from AG Cook and 100 gecs recent move into Guitars. But I don’t think its that at all. Never Stop Texting Me has the feel of a midwest emo album made with the bleeps and bloops and computer music. Digit-Emo Ambient?

Songs like Stairs underneath all the digitalism sound like they are built around a Texas Is The Reason chord progression. And iphone2 sounds a bit like Taking Back Sunday or Jimmy Eat World launched though a 56k modem? It’s rad.

Remember Kids: