Summer Doings | 2417

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Summer Doings

I turned 39 last week. I’m not particularly bothered about birthdays usually, but 40 being such a round number and having such a significant place in the cultural psyche I undersand why it has such a bit of a ring to it. It feels like something is coming over the horizon and I have just one year left until it arrives. One year left of my 30s. One year left to do all the things that 30 year old me hoped he would do with the decade. It’s a great motivator. 

Anyways, The sun has been shining here all week in London and my head has been elsewhere. Which has meant that an idea hasn’t sufficiently seized me to turn into a show. The phrase ‘the perfect life of others’ did pop into my mind the other day. It’s a great title, I though I’d write about the tension between curating ones feed, building a persona online etc . And the utter codswallop people post in YouTube comments and in the replies on social media. But that was it. There wasn’t much beyond that idea.

There’s an essay in there somewhere, just not from me, today, this week. 

Speaking of this week, on Tuesday I dropped the Episode 1 of Season 2 of my long form interview podcast about creativity and the imagination experience.computer. 

Here’s the trailer:

This month’s episode is with the multimedia artist, musician, and author Kris Saknussemm. Subscribe on Substack as well as wherever you’re listening to this episode to stay up to date. I’ve got some great guests line up for this season. 

In other news, I recently sat down and re-recorded the talk I gave at Human Entities in Lisbon back in June. It’s called ‘Solarpunk is dreaming green’. A 40min long talk about the last 12 years of Solarpunk, and I explore what I belive to be some of its core ideas. I’m pleased with how it turned out. I’ll put a link in the show notes if you want to check it out.

For the past few months over on my website I’ve only been sending out emails to subscribers when I post a new episode of this show or my weeknotes. I’ve started to think of thoes two things as my ‘newsletter’ channel. And this has opened up the way I think about my blog and allowed me to just … you know blog. I’ve been posting short things, lists, announcements or whatever recently. You can read them via RSS or just browse around the site.

Because of this I’ve been thinking about the indieweb expression POSSE – Publish (on your) Own Site, Syndicate Elsewhere.  It’s an idea and embraces how the web is supposed to work. But I’m not sure that it’s actually worth doing in 2024. Social media is dead and nobody clicks on links any more. The crazy reach we all had available to us last decade is never coming back. The only thing that we, as creative people online, can do is try and make good work and hope that other people come across it. Or more importantly, people like you the listener, tell other people about it. Literal word of mouth has always been the only game in town. 

Speaking of listeners: I’d like to say a big thank you to all the new subscribers who have signed up to a paid tier at thejaymo.net recently. The print run of my zine Start.Select.Reset that I send out to paid supporters 4 times a year continues to grow with every issue. It’s starting to feel somewhat like a real enterprise. I only need one more subscriber at 100 pounds a year, or two more at the 5 pounds a month and I can justify buying a laser printer and move to home production. 

This will streamline the whole process and opens up the opportunitiy to do some experiments that I can’t easily do when I’m using the copy shop around the corner. So as I say every year on my birthday episode, if you would like a zine from me and would like to support the show please head over to thejaymo.net/zine and sign up. 

Last but not least, my essay collection on worlds – worldrunning.guide continues to grow. I recently did a big editing pass on it I’m pleased with where it’s at. In addition to thinking about how I wrangle everything I make a do: my podcasts, my blog, my newsletter etc, I’ve been thinking about what is becoming known as ‘the doc web’. I might do an episode on it soon. Publishing stand alone things to googledocs at a URL is interesting and I’ve learnt a lot .

Anyways, thanks for listening I’ll be back with a normal episode next week.