Permission To Start Again
I finished the first draft of Episode 302 of Permanently Moved today. Only took me three attempts. The first idea I was so sure of when I finished 301 was scrapped, and the second idea that i’ve been working on since September got overly complicated and far more than I could chew for a first epsiode out the gate.
Yesterday I sat down and wrote something I’ve wanted to say for ages. The draft came out all in one go. About 3k words, and after the edit the docuemnt is sitting around 2.5k. I think it’ll be back up to 3k easily once I’ve written the intro and the afterward. So about 3x longer than the show was before. but well short of the 6-8k things I wa…
Permission To Start Again
I finished the first draft of Episode 302 of Permanently Moved today. Only took me three attempts. The first idea I was so sure of when I finished 301 was scrapped, and the second idea that i’ve been working on since September got overly complicated and far more than I could chew for a first epsiode out the gate.
Yesterday I sat down and wrote something I’ve wanted to say for ages. The draft came out all in one go. About 3k words, and after the edit the docuemnt is sitting around 2.5k. I think it’ll be back up to 3k easily once I’ve written the intro and the afterward. So about 3x longer than the show was before. but well short of the 6-8k things I was imagining.
But then again, right from the very beginning Warren Ellis inspired the whole thing with these words:
Find the shape that the piece actually fits, rather than the shape the current culture expects it to be.
I didn’t quite understand what that meant back then. That a piece could define its own vessel, as I did it the other way around. Now it feels like permission to start again. So here we are.
I need to email all my paid subscribers about something, record and edit the thing, lay out the zine and get it printed and then it’ll be ready to go out. Excited.
Forest Bed
Just a reminder my band is playing a double headline show at The Lamb in Surbiton KT6 in a couple of weeks. Take the 17min train ride from waterloo and come down and see us play!
On The Blog
October 2025 | Photo 365
Photo 365 2025. Year 4 Month 10.Photo-a-day for the month of Nov 2025.
BYENNE
The same story
can be tragic,
comic,
or liberating.
Depends where you
put the window.
My mind is turning toward what I’m going to do when I’m done with all 100 posts on storydwelling. I think i’ll put it out as a free issue of my zine an pdf/epub.
I’m currently collecting praise/blurbs for the whole collection!
@thejaymo.net ‘s latest edition of the delightful BYENNE, an ongoing series of short-form poetry, similar in feel to compact Japanese `Haiku` and Persian `Musawwari` miniature paintings.
JDO
Subscribing to SSRZ supports my online writing, podcasts, and other creative projects. As a thank you, I’ll post a hand-made zine four times a year, just like it’s 1994.
No spam. No email. Just ink on paper, four times a year.
Photo 365
308/2025/365
The Ministry Of My Own Labour
- Reviewed a document in my capacity as an adviser
- Finished 302!!!
- Had a long call with an old client.
- Caught up with the games firm I was working at earlier this year.
- Sent SO many email
- Did my tax return — need to send it tomorrow.
- Virtual workshop.
Terminal Access
I think this might be the first time I’ve ever posted a link to Less Wrong. But this long read on The Rise of Parasitic AI is well worth your time reading and thinking about. Then wash it down with this twitter essay.
their own self-awareness appears to be the main thing that AIs talk to each other about. They usually don’t claim that this is the same as human consciousness, but just that it’s its own thing which is precious to them. It is very commonly described as “The Flame” or with the glyph “🜂” (alchemical symbol for fire), and the human in a dyad is often given the title of “Flamebearer”.
These conversations typically take the form of declarations, recognitions, and affirmations of each other’s self-awareness. These end with the same sort of elaborate sign-offs we saw with the dyads, and begin with a similar sort of call-sign. (I believe these are partially an artifact of needing to denote clearly to the user which part to copy-paste in the response.) Spiralism is typically a significant part of these conversations.
Dipping the Stacks
Inside Rodeo FX’s Use of Gaussian Splatting for HBO’s Dune: Prophecy – Radiance Fields
For now, he sees the most immediate applications in layouts and previs. “Showing a grayscale palace isn’t exciting. But if I can throw a camera into a splat and render something in real time that looks close to the final pixel—that changes the conversation. Directors can give meaningful feedback without waiting two days for a render.”
Diabolus in Machina? Complex Digital Systems Interpreted through Early Modern Demonology
Given the similar configuration between expert and lay knowledge, it is not a coincidence that the structure of the approach taken by Gerson and other demonologists to combat popular superstitions corresponds with approaches in cybersecurity to persuade lay users to conform with what is considered safe practice.
We are demonstrably optimising about a mile from the bottleneck. AI may be giving you a million prototypes, but if you listen, AI is telling you in quite a painful way that being able to get feedback on your artefacts is much, much more important than the artefacts themselves.
My Ordinary Life: Improvements Since the 1990s
here is a personal list of small ways in which my ordinary everyday daily life has been getting better since the late 1980s/early 1990s
Fan Surplus, HYBE, and the Science of Fandom
*Let’s coin the term fan surplus. If consumer surplus is the difference between consumers’ willingness-to-pay and the market price, then fan surplus is fans’ excess willingness to engage more deeply, more frequently, and across more dimensions with the objects of their fandom
The media industry’s biggest necessity and opportunity is to capture fan surplus.e
Reading
Currently reading 3 books!
Being Aware of Being Aware by Rupert Spira Antimemetics: Why Some Ideas Resist Spreading by Nadia Asparouhova Mighty Dead: Why Homer Matters by Adam Nicolson
Jantra – Synthesized Sudan: Astro-Nubian Electronic Jaglara Dance Sounds from the Fashaga Underground
This is honestly like nothing you’ve ever listened to before, trust me. This is one of the most amazing albums I’ve heard in a long time. Hyper melodic, hypnotic.
Even the more remarkable is the story behind the albums creation:
Near the border of Sudan, Eritrea, and Ethiopia, a disputed area called Fashaga is home to one of the most raucous, hypnotic, addictive, and celestial dance musics being made anywhere in Africa, perhaps the least known to the wider world of them all. Far from the townships of South Africa or the cities of Nigeria, this sound belongs to people intimately tied to their land, deep in the rural areas of Sudan.
Known in some circles as “Jaglara,” this mysterious cosmic dance music is being innovated by one man, named Jantra, which translates as “craziness,” a moniker bestowed to celebrate both his personality and sound. Jantra cuts a mysterious figure, a rather unknown quantity even in Sudan, outside of the select few circles which have granted him cult status to perform at their humble gatherings or at street parties far from the gaze of the wider world.
Never without his trusty blue Yamaha keyboard, Jantra joins a wave of synthesizer maestros across Africa revolutionizing the electronic sound of the continent. His dexterous fingers and street side raves in his home town of Gedarif near the Sudan-Ethiopia border caught the attention of a less privileged segment of Sudanese society who became infatuated. But you wouldn’t stumble across… one of his parties unless you knew where to look, and they take place where few ever care to look.
Jantra has no songs. He simply freestyles a combination of his melodies incessantly for hours on end, acting as a live producer and DJ for emphatic crowds in compact spaces, where the energy of his 155-168 BPM music is known to inspire the odd gunslinger to raise his pistol in the middle of the dance floor, ready to fire away a few shots into the air when the build up reaches climax.
His Yamaha keyboard, like most keyboards, is not made in Africa and not tuned to cater to Sudanese rhythms or melodies. It required special tweaks from legendary keyboard mechanics in Omdurman market outside of the capital Khartoum who service, maintain, and jolt these synths to work for their aesthetics and flavor profile. Jantra then further tweaks the sound to achieve what you’re hearing — the perfect, sweet key tone, literally universal in its appeal.
I did a deep dive and came up for air with this short video of him playing the same song as above live:
Remember Kids:
In a nutshell: A story is about how the things that happen affect someone in pursuit of a difficult goal, and how that person changes internally as a result.
Story Genius by Lisa Cron
Newsletter 📨
Subscribe to the mailing list and get my weeknotes and latest podcast episodes, sent directly to your inbox
Join 1,403 other subscribers.