Flipping Switches, Tapping Dials

7 minutes

I’ve been bone tried all week. Grumbling to myself about it on Thursday I remembered that I was on day 10 of Covid. Which explains it. I did a 40min walk on Friday and I’ve still got quite a heavy chest, despite my symptoms only being a head cold. So glad this this round of Covid wasn’t as bad as the first time.

Anywhoos.

This week as has mostly consisted of flipping switches, tapping dials and reading gauges.

I feel like I’m back at the controls of a machine that has been set to autopilot for a long time.

This is not just the usual new years optimism, but also some ‘If not now, when?, if not you, who?’ energy. Zine subscribers will know I had ‘It’s Now or Never’ in the most recent issue. All three aphorisms are a good way of describing the process of rebooting the machine.

I like to imagine I’m sitting inside a giant jaeger, actually called a jay-ger. Just a huge giant robot version of me thats going to stomp around cities and cause billions of dollars of property damage that no one ever seems concerned about in the anime. What I’m going to destroy or stomp on in 2023 remains to be seen.

2022

I wrote up my 2022 year in review post this week:


BuJo 2023

As part of the dial tapping, over several evenings this week I got my bullet journal for 2023 sorted out .

It’s the usual layout and design.

Image of a stack of a6 Moleskine notebooks.

It’s great to see all the notebooks in one place.

I got quite a bit out of reviewing 2022’s notebook to be honest. I pulled out some good ideas and other notes that needed transferring into my Notion.

It’s also funny what a year of doing a photo 365 will do to you. Compare the photo above the the one I took back in 2019 in the post about notebooks and obsessive list making.

Domains

I’ve finally consolidated all the domains I own into one registrar. I am letting 8 domains go over the course of the next couple of months. Combined with the consolidation, this whole process is going to save me over $150 bucks a year. LOL.

It takes a lot of time to unlock domains, wait for transfer codes, put in 2FA for domains. Hours in fact.

I have always been a bit of a domain hoarder and it was all a bit of a sprawling mess. now don’t get me wrong. I still own 23 domains, and a further 11 variations on those domains but since the pandemic, I’ve got that number down from 50+ unique properties.

For example: RIP surviveth.is

A domain I bought once because I thought it would be a cool name for a zine about zombies.

Everything I own now is related to things inflight, or projects/ideas I actually want to execute on in the near future. Like Family of Giants.


Permanently Moved

Lost in the Woods

After 10 years of meditation, I’ve concluded it’s not an act of self care. It’s an act of colossal self indulgence.

This years theme for 301 is absolutely over the top ridiculous. Totally unnecessary to go that hard. When was the last time you heard a show with a stoner rock intro theme? HAHAHA. I was loling to my self the whole time I was making it, then laughing even hearder when I was editing it into this weeks show.

Which by the way, if you haven’t read/listened to it yet, I personally think, it’s one of the better things I’ve written in ages.

Photo 365

360 / 365

You may notice this photo is labeled 360 / 365.

I decided towards the end of last year that I should count down the photos of a 365 and not up. It’s more psychologically satisfying.

The Ministry Of My Own Labour

  • Wrote a list of things I want to get done in the next 6 weeks.
  • Sorted out loads of life admin
  • Made 301 theme
  • Updated and archived my laptop. It didn’t go very well.
  • Did a boat load of house work

Terminal Access

The boys over at Agitator pod have been ramping up their patreon – I subscribed.

All my other friends seem to have been quite quiet on the internet over the last week. Maybe newsletters will spring to live next week?

Dipping the Stacks

In a Future Filled With Electric Cars, AM Radio May Be Left Behind – The New York Times

“If you can make a vehicle drive by itself,” Mr. Winnekins said, referring to the driver-assistance systems in Teslas and other vehicles, “you can make a decent radio receiver.”

Towards a theory of the creator – by Alexander Iadarola

It is too late to push back against the term “creator.” Most culture industry people I know never say it out loud, much less discuss the ways it displaces many of the things we love. But for better or worse, the creator names an important figure in our societ

Creating Community in Hybrid Festivals | by Sarah Wolozin | Dec, 2022 | Immerse

We began research in late 2021 on hybrid festivals and how they hold space for communities in “stereo reality,” to use Virilio’s term.

Consoles and Competition – Stratechery by Ben Thompson

The real shift, though, was the emergence of game engines as the dominant mode of development: instead of building a game for a specific console, it made much more sense to build a game for a specific engine which abstracted away the underlying hardware.

TikTok Cannot Afford the Music Industry

TikTok as a music killer wasting precious youth attention if not properly monetized; but if it signs the right legal contract, it can aid industry growth. Either still downplays the firm’s large losses, scrambling from business model to business model, and the crunch being felt by its most recent investors.

Reading

I finished Children of Memory by Adrian Tchaikovsky. I went in expecting another ‘uplift’ book. Instead I found a long extended mediation on the nature of intelligence, selfhood, being, and identity, all wrapped up on space horror. Its a really different book, but wow. If you are working at the edge of where AI stands and have read the previous two books definitely check this one out.

I’m still reading How to Read a Book by American philosopher Mortimer J. Adler. It’s such a weird book. It’s like a Tesseract that unpacks in dimensionality as you read it.

I sunk a Warhammer book in 3 days to kick off the year. I listened to Sanguinius: The Great Angel by Chris Wraight. Wraight is a great sci-fi writer and I like his cybernoir books. This book is ultimately a short character portrait of a flawed demigod. Ironically. Maybe this book has a lot of Wraight himself in the POV character?

Continuing my interest in computing history from last year I stared reading The Man Who Invented the Computer: The Biography of John Atanasoff, Digital Pioneer – by Jane Smiley. He didn’t invent the computer of course Mauchly and Eckert did. but I’m looking forward to reading it. The lawsuits between Atanasoff and Eckert in the 1950’s were huge/high profile affairs.

Music

thejaymo.net Spotify Playlist

RAYE – Escapism

I know it’s unusual for me to blog about a song thats currently Number 1 in the UK. But I’m doing so to contribute to Raye’s victory lap.

Honestly bravo, good for her. Absolutely FUCK POLYDOR.

If you aren’t familiar with what happened check out this overview on the BBC.

she publicly parted ways with record label Polydor in 2021, saying she was being treated as a “rent-a-vocal” dance artist.

“Imagine this pain,” she wrote in an open letter in June 2021. “I have been signed to a major label since 2014… and I have had albums on albums of music sat in folders collecting dust, songs I am now giving away to A-list artists because I am still awaiting confirmation that I am good enough to release an album.

“I’ve done everything [Polydor] asked me, I switched genres, I worked seven days a week. I’m done being a polite pop star.”

The fact a song about substance abuse with multiple tempo changes can make it to #1 after being totally dismissed by her record label is really inspiring: Raye was told ‘people who heard the song were like, ‘Yeah, this is cool [but] it’s just something Raye needs to get out of her system’.’

This single is a triumph for independent artists and creators everywhere.

Remember Kids:

NPC XP MEME

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