During the first two weeks of July I always feel bone tired. It’s definitely hayfever, but knowing this is the case doesn’t stop my motivation and energy levels from dropping into the negative. It sucks.
A month ago I was wondering aloud about getting Freedom App to replace the browser based Blocksite app. And Ben Vickers messaged straight away saying YES DO IT.
I bought the lifetime licence which at the time was 50% off ($100) and… so far my experience with the app has been amazing. Freedom is totally hardcore and does what it says on the tin: Blocks everything that you tell it to block. No BS, not sneaky workarounds that I’m aware of.
The ‘news’ now feels like an alien realm full of madness. Social media feels like a realm full of demons. And this is just the result of being ‘free’ for a month. I wonder where things go from here?
With Freedom, I feel that only now 5 years on, that I’m getting to the heart of some of the things I wrote in Your Attention is Sovereign. I was saying to PGR on chat this week that I’m using Freedom as willpower alone to stop looking at social media and wasting time on ‘the news’ is full spoon theory. I just don’t have enough energy in me to NOT look at the news or whatever the current short form social network du jour is.
Blocking it all between the hours of 8am and 6.30pm has been a revelation. At the beginning I was like a smoker patting his jeans for the phantom pouch of tobacco. Opening tabs and typing URLS. But a week in, its become more natural to not think about it. About what i’m missing.
It’s unpopular to say that you ‘just don’t care’ about something. But I really don’t care about social media or the news right now. I don’t need to be shown over and over again (see todays meme) whats wrong with the world. It’s just not something I need in my life. I wish I’d had the guts to do this years ago.
Permanently Moved
There is a Well of Words Within You
I realise that I was not done trying to articulate why The Artist should start a dairy. So today I have also done something I’ve never done before in 230+ episodes, I’ve made the same episode again. A second run up at the same subject from the same set of notes. There may, in future, be a 3rd iteration of this episode with passages taken from both episodes.
A companion to Episode 2320: Stale Yesterdays.
Photo 365
The Ministry Of My Own Labour
- Writing, working on the impossible object talk @ the new centre
- This is hard going. Lots still to do
- Call about a possible collab
- Research that involved going in depth into a liquidation auction lol
- Finished editing my recent Experience.Computer interview with Kris Saknussemm
- Mad push to get some admin sorted before the beginning of next week
- Spent some time one evening learning the basics of DaVinci Resolve
Terminal Access
Huw wrote about the ‘Huw Edwards Affair‘ that so gripped the media nation over here in the UK this week. It’s a thoughtful long read is about how prudish language of perversion is weaponised against gays and how dangerous this is.
Edwards has been called a nonce, a pervert, a corruptor of youth, a liar, and any number of unfounded libels online. There is no evidence that any of these are true, but they should be familiar to anyone with a knowledge or recollection of recent gay history, and he has been treated this way precisely because the relationship was homosexual.
JDO over on the Broken River Collective wrote about my favourite sci-fi novel – Altered Carbon. I was supposed to join the Agitator bookclub to discuss it, but ‘events’ intervened and I was asleep.
When I read a book that I enjoy that much, Iām taking it in on two mental tracks. On one, Iām having pure fun, enjoying the āone more beerā feeling of late-night page turning. On the other, Iām mining it for its secrets. Iām attempting to understand what makes the book work so well.
Dipping the Stacks
Game engines are a really efficient worlding technology as they allow for an immediate immersion in a speculative narrative that’s in itself is its own microcosm, but is also spongy, parasitic, and rife with references.
The value in writing lies in what we discover while writing. Auto-generating text based on other peopleās discoveries and then automatically summarising that text by finding commonalities with existing text creates a loop of mechanised nonsense.
Itās a prayer wheel for capitalism.
All the nerds are dead – by Sam Kriss – Numb at the Lodge
Nerdery is when you slurp happily from the toilet, and come up grinning and ask for more.
This is why nerds are always so belligerently defensive about the dreck they choose to consume. They are mortally offended by the suggestion that Marvel might be somehow less good than Chris Marker, or that K-pop might be worse than Rimsky-Korasov. A kind of inverted snobbery; a snobbery against value as such. Itās not enough that the things they like are, by definition, globally hegemonic,
Why do entertainment executives hate entertainment?
Why do entertainment executives hate entertainment?
I donāt really think the problem of bad TV in the streaming era is an issue of ācreativityā (versus conservatism) or āriskā (versus safety) so much as it is an issue of professionalism (versus saying āyesā to 1,000 shows at once, under-developing them, and then killing them en masse for no clear reason).
How the Marvel Cinematic Universe Swallowed Hollywood
the Marvel phenomenon has yanked Hollywood into a franchise-drunk new era, in which intellectual property, more than star power or directorial vision, drives what gets made, with studios scrambling to cobble together their own fictional universes.
Reading
I listened to Kasrkin by Edoardo Albert this week. I’ve read one 40k book by Albert before and I really like it so thought I’d give this one a go. It begins as a sort of Dune-lite sand planet story and then takes a hard turn into alien abduction novel. I’ve read one 40k book by Albert before and I really liked it.
Music
thejaymo.net Spotify Playlist
OM – Gebl Barkal
OM have a new single/double A side. Their first new music since BBC sessions in 2019. I say new its actually a re-release of their 2008 sub-pop singles club record which i’ve never seen IRL to buy or heard.
The A side of the record is a 5min exploration of a repeated baseline. It hypnotically loops round and a round. The drums and guitar/synths change timbre and tone around it. This song , feels like the moment you commit to a mantra. This is the first open ended repetition for the rest of your life. You have to go all in.
The lyrics, in typical OM style, are oblique and allude to Dervish’s. When the short few lines drop the looping nature of the baseline is decontextualised as a spin.
The B-Side on the record titled ‘Version’ is the same song. Not sure if its the same take or a different one. But again, it feels like commitment. The ALL IN nature of mantra. This early work shows exactly the promise of what OM would go on to achieve with the music in the decade or so following.
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