As I write this it’s super early on Monday morning. I’m using the ‘Timeshifter App‘ for the first time as I’m leaving for the Autonomous Worlds Assembly in Istanbul tomorrow.
This app is supposed to help you avoid jetleg and feel fresh where, and whenever, you travel. All my friends who travel a lot swear by it – not only for sorting out ones body clock but it drastically reduces the chances of getting sick, and immune system isn’t thrown out of wack.
So I’m up early this morning as instructed, and I’m using my SAD lamp to get some bright white light into my eyes. Presumably I’ll also be super tired tonight and the early night before my 3am start tomorrow should feel more natural too.
The app says I need to rawdog Friday without any coffee though – the day I fly home after 2 intense conference days! I can’t say I’m very happy about this. But I’m going to follow the apps instructions and see how I get on. A friend who doesn’t travel anywhere, but does a lot of semi-frequent and bizarre shift work to speak with Australia or West Cost US etc also uses Timeshifter. And she said that it’s the caffeine instructions the are the most important!
Anyways’ I’m really looking forward to the conference, I’ll be hosting/moderating a panel between Venkatesh Rao, Kara Kittel and GVN on ‘Decentralised Narratives‘ on Wednesday 15th, and I’ll be giving a 30min talk on ‘Myth-Making Mechanisms in Autonomous Worlds‘ on Thursday 16th. All the talks should be on the AW/Devconnect23 livestream and obviously I’ll post about them once they are up online as VODs.
It was a really busy week last week, and the weekend full of small things, so I’m a bit late getting to my Weeknotes. I’ll be pending most of today finishing the slides off my talk!
Permanently Moved
Discover the return of iconic fashion and music, alongside the significant cultural shift post-pandemic. Jay explores the impact on technology, from AI to the Metaverse, reflecting on past predictions by Wired magazine. Tune in for a nostalgic journey connecting past insights with today’s digital advancements in this episode of Y2K renaissance!
Full Show Notes: https://www.thejaymo.net/2023/11/12/301-2337-like-we-did-in-y2k/
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Photo 365
The Ministry Of My Own Labour
- Multiple calls, some paid, some expert
- Good coffee meeting
- AUTONOMOUS WORLDS TALK
- This is all I have been focusing on
- Prepping for the AW panel I’m also moderating at the conference next wee
Terminal Access
Popular design critic and Youtube celebrity Gilbert Again recently wrote the essay Seeds, not Brands for Folklore.xyz.
Folklore proposes that a contemporary, networked brand be designed not for its human demographics, but for its machine intermediaries. In lieu of finalised assets — iconography, typography, photography — Folklore provides seeds and prompts: inputs for further, generative, creation and mediation. These seeds can be thought of as descendants of artist Harun Farocki’s concept of the ‘operational image’. With this term, Farocki theorised a genre of images not meant for human attention. Images produced by one machine for another to process in the course of a computational operation; be it identification, navigation, or something inscrutable. Operational images are neither outputs nor inputs; they are throughputs.
It’s fantastic, you should all go read it.
Dipping the Stacks
The fear in the announcers’ faces was human, but unbecoming of professionals, I thought.
How Millennials Grew Up and Got Old
Which is why I cringe at the “Gen-Z will save us” narrative: its main purpose is not to praise Gen-Z, but to excuse other generations from the hard work of saving ourselves and each other.
Is Everything Wrestling? – The New York Times
With each passing year, more and more facets of popular culture become something like wrestling: a stage-managed “reality” in which scripted stories bleed freely into real events, with the blurry line between truth and untruth seeming to heighten, not lessen,
Is awareness a requisite of cosplay? To what extent must we know we’re doing it to be doing it? Must cosplay, like war or bankruptcy, be declared to be “real”? A curious question given cosplay’s deep bond to the imaginary, which brings me to my next missing thing— imagination.
Why America Is Out of Ammunition – BIG by Matt Stoller
But if you actually look at the guts of the bureaucracy, nothing is happening, because doing something about our industrial base means thwarting Wall Street, and that’s generally not something that’s considered on the table among normie policymakers.
Reading
Cybermapping and the Writing of Myth by Paul Jahshan
I finally finished Cybermapping and the Writing of Myth by Paul Jahshan. First published in 2006, this book is one of the many wild books I’ve been reading about the early internet. This book is full of critical theory, fiction, architecture and philosophy.The books focus explores how to ‘map’ or find ones bearings in cyberspace. Something that we are all still getting to grips with 17 years later.
Fall of Cadia by Robert Rath
When I’m working on something and or really busy I listen to warhammer books and switch my brain off. This week I burnt though the audio book for the mammoth 100k+ word long book Fall of Cadia by Robert Rath. Wow. What a book. What a task to turn one of the most famous events in recent warhammer lore into a novel. The story begins with lots of POV characters, which is wild and disorientating. But stylistically it does a great job of conveying the chaos of a global warzone. As the story progresses, people die and the side loop stories close down. The final 1/3 of the book moves at a breakneck pace, racing you towards the stories terrible conclusion and fate of a planet.
I also really enjoyed the afterword about visiting the DMZ between North Korea and how that experience influenced his depiction of Cadia’s highly militarised society.
Music
thejaymo.net Spotify Playlist
Tim Maia – Nobody Can Live Forever (The Existential Soul Of Tim Maia)
I was at the barbers to get my hair cut this week and Tommy the owner )who’s been cutting my hair for like a decade) has a really good taste in music. So that’s basically all we talk about 8 times a year.
This week he had Nobody Can Live Forever by Tim Maia on the turn table.
Maia pioneered sambalanço – combining samba, soul, funk and rock and roll. And is an ‘Icon’ of Brazilian music.
Apparently he was quite the character
In addition to being a megastar, he also joined the cult of rational culture and publicly fell out with them. In the 80’s he made Disco and toured into the 1990’s competing in what he called ‘his “triathlon”—consuming whiskey, cocaine, and marijuana before a gig’ He fell ill during a triathlon and died in 1998 at 55.
His work is both political, funky and soulful:
Because love is realy the answer
This will have to agree
We’ll be celebration
When the people be free
This song, O Caminho Do Bem from 1976 is funky as hell.
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