thejaymo

September 30, 2023

Forest Bed 🎸 | Permanently Moved 🔊 | Social Media 💉

Permanently Moved will be celebrating its 250th episode during this next run of 10 shows. I’m looking forward to achieving that!

Full Show Notes: https://www.thejaymo.net/2023/09/30/2331-season-10/

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Permanently moved is a personal podcast 301 seconds in length, written and recorded by @thejaymo

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Season 10!

Sorry about the spotty posting recently – I was enjoying my summer and my holiday. But I’m back now, and ready for season 10!

Permanently Moved will be celebrating its 250th episode during this next run of 10 episodes. I’m looking forward to achieving that. A milestone worth celebrating.

In aggregate, it all feels like a herculean blur of effort. Speaking of effort, making 40 episodes a year instead of 50 is great. Hands down the best decision I made back in January for this year. There’s absolutely no point in killing yourself doing something you enjoy doing. I honestly don’t know how Youtubers who make work for the algorithm and not the audience do it. Week after week, year after year. But they don’t, do they? They either eventually burn out or have public breakdowns.

Anyways.

Reviewing the episodes I’ve put out this year I’m pretty pleased with them. However I have noticed that with 10 episodes less a year to work with, I’ve made less shows that aren’t essays. Not that I’ve ever thought of shows where I speak about life and what I’m up to as filler episodes, far from it. But since this is, after all, a personal podcast I’ll begin season 10 by speaking personally.

Firstly, my ‘slow sad country band’ Forest Bed put out our first EP last month. Your keyword search is Forest Bed, Placeholders EP. Or you can find us on Instagram or Bandcamp.

It’s had some good reviews. Americana UK described the EP’s opening track Footsteps as having the “earthy feel of a long-lost Fairport Convention recording.” and another as having “echoes of Lindisfarne”. Which isn’t bad at all, coming from such an august publication.

Plastic Mag reviewed us and said it captured “a sonic landscape that feels at once timeless and contemporary” and Mesmerized wrote that our EP is “kaleidoscopic” and liked our “slow-paced shoegaze-y formula”. Which is a lot of references for an EP that’s only 4 tracks. We’re obviously doing something right. If genres like Americana and Cosmic Country float your boat then please do check us out and buy a tote or something over on Bandcamp. 

Secondly, back in July I was encouraged to buy Freedom.to. An app that describes itself as ‘The World’s Best App & Website Blocker’. Having used a few different ones over the years, I can confirm that the marketing isn’t a lie.

It’s completely changed my life. Between the hours of 8am and 6.30pm across all my devices – both laptops and my phone – I have the news, social media, and Youtube completely blocked. I’ve spent the whole summer saying to people who send me links (especially tweets) “I can’t see this until after 6.30”. 99% of the time they’ll reply “It doesn’t matter, it wasn’t important anyway”.

A few times recently I’ve gone days without looking at any news or front page headlines at all. News still reaches me of course, either via Discord, Slack or DM. I figure that if someone is going out of their way to tell me about something – especially in person – then it’s probably, actually news. You know?

The first few weeks of using Freedom I felt like an addict with the shakes. Bereft of distraction as everything and everywhere I wasted time on was blocked. Eventually I had to face the fact that there was only work to be done.

After about a month I also noticed that my reflexive and repetitive behavioural loop of checking my phone every five minutes was broken. I wasn’t picking it up and waking the screen or immediately pulling it out of my pocket when standing in line at the supermarket. A good tip if you an android user is to set up focus mode for the same duration as the Freedom block period. This will grey out the apps in the app draw and mute notifications.

It’s somewhat galling to admit that in order to get the most out of the powerful and futuristic computing machines I own, I have to remove functionality from them. But then again Freedom is now doing what my willpower alone couldn’t. So I’m all for it. If you’re tired of internet bullshit then give it a go. Buying this software is worth every penny spent.

Speaking of which, if you also are tired of Adobes rent seeking and chafe at paying for creative cloud then it is worth giving Affinity suite a look. I recently bought Affinity Photo, Designer and Publisher in a sale  and they are very capable pieces of software. I helped design an artefact with Rafa the builder for the summer of protocols and I’ve been using it to design my zine.

Which brings me nicely to the last thing I wanted to mention. Issue 7 of Start Select Reset will be going out to my mailing list subscribers next week. It’s all ready to go, I’m just waiting for the local copy shop to get their printer repaired. This issue is called Quiet Quests and features a small LiteLARP or RPG that you can play at work. It uses the last digits of the hour as a random encounter which you check against a table of 60 small acts of kindness to perform in the office environment.

If you want a copy or enjoy the show and would like to help me reach 250 episodes please subscribe and support the show at www.thejaymo.net/support

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