It’s probably for the best that I had a week off from making the show. I start work on a new project next week, so have spent a great deal of time getting my ducks in a row for the kick off.
I wonder if it’s a mix of low social media use and not having to deliver a show this week has resulted in more mental space. I’ve had several ideas for future shows throughout the week and captured the moment by sitting down for 10/15mins and bashing out 500 words with several bullet points at the end to finish it off. This hasn’t happened before. Feels good tho.
I also used the extra headspace to take a look at some of the remaining things on my ‘life list’ that I wrote at the beginning of the year. So I spent evenings this week knocking off some of the ‘medium effort’ items on it that I’ve been putting off.
The three biggest wins are as follows:
Day One APP
I want to write about this in more detail, but the TLDR is that since the beginning of the year I’ve been copy pasting my diary from all its the various formats that I’ve used over the years (OhLife emails (I lost my json export) .txt files, markdown files, Google docs etc) into the Day One app from Automattic. 1220 entries beginning August 2009. Since the new year I read and reviewed a great deal of my adult life moving it from one place to another.
It’s been quite interesting and a bit of an emotional experience. Glad it’s over.
Worldrunning.guide
One of the most annoying things about having ideas for ambitious projects and then not executing on them is that they hang around in the mind as open loops. This results in unnecessary cognitive overhead. At worst it results in guilt.
One of those open loops has been worldrunning.guide. Two years ago I set up the domain to point to a Google Doc; with a little spiel about world running saying that I had an idea to write a book in public, basically a promise to write something there some day.
Which obviously I never got around too…
Until now. Recently I was doing some website admin and noticed that according to Cloudflare’s analytics worldrunning.guide gets over 500 hits a month.
Which means for years I’ve been dropping 100’s of people into an empty google doc with a broken promise dated 2021. Not a great first impression. This knowledge pushed up the urgency of doing something about the entry marked simply worldrunning.guide(?) on my list of things to do.
This week I collected and lightly edited 15 episodes of Permanently Moved I’ve made on the subject of worlds and put them into the document.
Its nice to have all my public thinking/writing on worlds in on place, and am looking forward to writing more and seeing worldrunning.guide grow.
The only thing left to do over there for now, is write an introduction.
I’ve been joking that I shook my blog and a 13.3k word essay collection fell out.
Start Select Reset
For some reason I didn’t have a page on my website about my zine!
I’ve always just linked to the zine category page – which probably isn’t the best presentation when you are trying to advertise the existence of something and hope that people will pay to sign up!
So this is now fixed. I’ve also put it prominently in sites menu too. Collapsing my hello/contact page into the About menu.
I’m really happy with how the page turned out. I learnt a lot about some of the newer wordpress design and layout tools. Looking forward to re-themeing my site soon. Tinkering and noodling with this now 14 year old website is still as fun as when I built my first Geocities page in the 90’s.
At the bottom of the page I also included a little history and documentation (that I have to hand currently) of all the zines I’ve been involved in over the years. I made my first ever zine in the mid 90s! when i was 9/10 years old. Click though to see photo! lol.
Photo 365
The Ministry Of My Own Labour
- Booked flights and hotels and all that admin jazz
- Workshops next week.
- Sorted out worldrunning.guide finally. Lots of content compiled over there.
- Got my first hit on the blog from permissive.works
- Many calls this week.
- EmAiLs, so many emails.
Terminal Access
Urbanomic posted this fun video about the conception and making of the Toy Model AGI Playset – an exclusive Lego kit with accompanying map produced to accompany Reza’s book Intelligence and Spirit. Stuff like this really tickles me.
Dipping the Stacks
Computers in the 1970s – History-Computer
What were computers like in the 1970s? From design features to programming language, technology has come a long way. Here’s your guide!
Why 65 Percent of Fourth Graders Can’t Really Read
COVID didn’t necessarily cause these structural breakdowns as much as it exposed just how broken the system was to begin with.
How broken? Consider the shocking fact that 65 percent of American fourth-grade kids can barely read.
New research suggests that privacy in the metaverse might be impossible | VentureBeat
A new paper from the University of California Berkeley reveals that privacy may be impossible in the metaverse without innovative new safeguards to protect users.
The Bitter End of “Content” – Freddie deBoer
The marketplace of attention was supposed to solve this problem; we were told that the good channels would be elevated by the platforms and that people would stop watching the bad channels. But the marketplace of attention cares only about attention.
Social Media Is Dying – Ed Zitron’s Where’s Your Ed At
There are only so many living souls with devices and wallets, only so many advertisers, and only so many ways to connect these two parties in a way that doesn’t break the law
Reading
Still reading If You Want to Write by Brenda Ueland – first published 1938. It’s a wonderful book about writing. Can’t recommend it enough.
Also how good is this chapter title!
Still reading Gods of Mars – book #3 in the Forges of Mars series by Graham McNeill. It’s a chonky boy, by far the longest book in the trilogy. I’m about half way though. I suspect I’ll finish it whilst waiting around in the airport next week.
A whole bunch of books arrived this week! Posted ’em on my Tumblr
Music
thejaymo.net Spotify Playlist
Mice Parade – lapapọ
Mice Parade are a recent discovery of mine, really really enjoying them. The internet informs me that lapapọ is their first album in a decade.
The things that struck me first about this album is their drummer. Wow. After that, on my second listen to the album walking around town during the week I was trying to place the band. A sort of Sebadoh, lo-fi, indie rock adjacent band but with way better musicianship
Songs range on here from synthy numbers to folk infused indie rock to mesmeric musical poetry.
Track 2, Eisa Dancers reminds me of something that would have been on Leaf label in the early 00’s. This album is great. I don’t usually mention cover art but I really like it. Sets the mood of the album. If you’re a fan of late 90’s experimental indie give this one a spin.
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