Elsewhere

Back in Sept 2019 I posted Start Select Reset Zine issue #001 online. It’s had 15k downloads since being uploaded.

However, just because I wrote a PDF called ‘Your Attention Is Sovereign‘ and talk about this sort of thing on my podcast a lot – doesn’t mean I’ve been able to always practice what I preach.

I realised today I need to comb though my weeknotes and podcasts to find all my struggles with with ‘how I use the internet’. I need to put them all in a category – mainly for my own reference.

Just over a year go I wrote about ‘Deprogramming’

I’ve spent more than a decade being ‘Extremely Online’. Now I wish not to be.

In October last year I wrote about how I wanted to ‘check out’

This isn’t just me further railing against social media. More of a re orientation around the edges of ‘Normalcy’. It is my relationship to the entire meta layer of culture and media.

Checking Out for me, really means Checking In to other things.

The question is check in to what?

Elsewhere I’ve written about going on a ‘Word Diet’. About how I use RSS, and the possibility of an RSS revival. Last week I wrote about how happy I am to see blogs bursting back into life.

My 2019 post on why people should stop writing Twitter threads and start a blog frequently still shows up in my stats. It’s been read 80+ times in 2022 so far alone. I wonder how many of those great threads on Twitter directly after the 2019 election are still receiving views and impressions? (The half life of a tweet is 30mins)

Ahmet A. Sabancı’s blogchain: ‘Rethinking How I Use Internet’ is a kind of parallel dialogue to the scattered thoughts I have across my blog. But his is all organised, in one place. Very sensible.

This is all to say that… I’ve been thinking about how I engage with the internet for quite some time. It’s taken literal years, but I think I’ve figured it out.

Here’s where I am on the internet in 2022:

How I Use the Web, How and Where You Can Follow Me

I am currently on the web in three public places. Pinboard, Tumblr, and this Blog.

The RSS feeds for each location are embedded below. The titles of each column are URLS to the RSS feeds if you wish to add them to you own feed reader.

I’ve included the post dates below so you can see how active/prolific I am in each of the three locations.

RSS Feeds

If you don’t currently use a RSS reader I implore and encourage you to use one.

Matt Webb maintains a fantastic website called aboutfeeds.com that describes the basics.

Use web feeds to subscribe to websites and get the latest content in one place.

Feeds put you in control. It’s like subscribing to a podcast, or following a company on Facebook. You don’t need to pay or hand over your email address. You get the latest content without having to visit lots of sites, and without cluttering up your inbox. Had enough? Easy: unsubscribe from the feed.

You just need a special app called a newsreader.

This site explains how to get started.

Tom Critchlow recently posted about ‘Increasing the surface area of blogging‘ that gestures toward where things should probably go next with RSS. Worth checking out.

Pinboard

I migrated to Pinboard after Yahoo killed del.icio.us back in 2008. Pinboard is a bookmarking web service for storing, sharing, and discovering web bookmarks.

The UX is IMO ‘perfect’. 10/10 cannot be improved. Just look at it:

My oldest bookmark is from August 2006. So I have 16 years of things I’ve found interesting on the internet all saved/tagged/stored.

Lots of people stan Roam Research, and Obsidian.md these days, but my second brain is stored in Pinboard.

I am an absolutely prolific bookmarker Pinboard user – I save multiple things a day, every day. I’m so prolific that OG web aggregator Joe Jenett over at iwebthings listed me in his list of notable Pinboard users earlier this year.

Recently, I’ve been making the split second of extra effort to fill in the ‘notes’ section of Pinboard’s bookmark applet. This results in a description coming though along with the link in the RSS feed (I follow my own Pinboard RSS feed in my reader obviously).

This is my ‘microblog’ in the original sense of Twitter.

Anyways, If you want a ‘here’s a cool link’ twitter post experience from me, follow my Pinboard‘s rss feed and connect to the fire hose.

I’m sure there’s all sorts of things in the complete dragon hoard of my bookmarks that probably shouldn’t be public or one reason or another – its 16 years worth of history after all – but it is what it is.

Tumblr

Unlike most people I know, I never left Tumblr. I’ve been using it since April 2008.

Running solarpunks.net has since 2014 has been the main reason I stuck around. It has however, been (and still is) super fun.

I used to have a poetry Tumblr, and a really emo image macro Tumblr. I’ve run single topic image blogs, research tumblr’s, all sorts.

I deleted my poetry blogs around 2013/14 – an act I now regret. I sometimes still see my own JPG poems go past on my dash un-credited and know that some of my time/effort/creativity from that era still exists in the world.

Tumblr is fucking great. You should leave Twitter and get back on it immediately. In 2022 it’s just as full of goblins posting absolutely insane shit as it used to be. Only today its Zoomer insanity – unlike Millennial Insta/Twitter and Boomer Facebook.

Importantly: Tumblr is now owned by Automattic (the people who make wordpress). Internet hero and Automattic CEO Matt Mullenweg recently said on the Techcrunch found podcast that Tumblr’s code will be fully open sourced soon.

The idea that Tumblr is going to be the largest open source social network (and best/most active) in the world is mind blowing. Super cool. People who are on mastodon.social for ideological reasons or whatever should consider moving back to Tumblr.

I post at least once a day somewhere on my Tumblr, or solarpunks.net or at other tumblr URLS I’m not going to tell you about.

Tumblr is for my light weight thoughts / and blogging. A little commentary from me along side the rich media, videos, images, link embeds it provides.

zexulo.xyz

Obviously this blog is where I ‘blog-blog’. As I say in my websites meta description – this is where I ‘live’ on the internet. My first post was April 2010.

zexulo.xyz is my body of work/work of body. A place for longer form public thinking. A home for my podcast scripts, work updates. life announcements etc.

The home for my public face on the Internet.

Eventually I hope to break out these weeknotes and make it a standalone newsletter you can subscribe to, adding a 4th column on the list above.

Zine

I also make a physical zine. Published and posted 4 times a year to my paid supporters.

I’m starting a physical zine, a physical newsletter, in 2022 because I belive thats where I belive real value is.

As our culture moves / trends towards ever greater levels of abstraction, making and sending real things to real people is the way forward. The essay in issue #002 is all about this ‘real’.

I consider this as another place that you can follow me on the internet – if your so inclined.

Supporters Subscribed at £5 a Month
or £100 a Year will receive a hand made zine via snail mail seasonally.

Final Thoughts

I’ll admit, 3 RSS feeds and 1 physical newsletter seems all very annoying and unnecessary for people who are used to siloed and closed social media systems.

But my pre-emptive response to that is: RSS feeds can be followed/added to your own RSS reader. I’ll be all in one place, a single streamlined experience. Again: aboutfeeds.com.

If you want the ‘complete jaymo collection’ and would like to receive a physical zine from me then sign up to support my work.

Photo 365

Permanently Moved

Pinball Wizard

Pinball Wizard is the name for a 1970’s cyborg. People who merged with a world inside a machine and first ‘touched’ the metaverse.

The Ministry Of My Own Labour

• Smashed out a whole chapter of the metaverse book. Well, the bare bones of one.
• Meeting with the Settlement Team
• Saw all my radical friends!
• Working on issue 003 of the zine.
• Updated a bunch of bits and blogs around the bob. More to do before the big theme switch.

Dipping the Stacks

The ADHD Urge to Find the Online ADHD Community Annoying

What’s really striking is the extent to which a disorder associated with garrulousness and substance abuse has been captured so utterly by nerds.

Yann LeCun’s big bet for building intelligent machines | MIT Technology Review

One of the godfathers of deep learning pulls together old ideas to sketch out a fresh path for AI, but raises as many questions as he answers.

Is your smartphone ruining your memory? A special report on the rise of ‘digital amnesia’ | Memory | The Guardian

‘I can’t remember anything’ is a common complaint these days. But is it because we rely so heavily on our smartphones? And do the endless alerts and distractions stop us forming new memories?

Cops Are Still Fainting When They Touch Fentanyl | Defector

Cops are having panic attacks upon encountering fentanyl because they believe they are overdosing. 

How Nexon accidentally invented microtransactions | VentureBeat

Nexon invented free-to-play games when it was preparing to remove one of its subscription titles because of a lack of players. The team decided to give the game away for free and sell some in-game items as an experiment. Shortly after, subscription membership skyrocketed.

Reading

I finished reading Sid Meier’s Memoir! on Monday. It’s a really great book. It begins with his first game and progresses sequentially throughout his career. Wonderful stories and anecdotes about the founding of MicroProse, his obsession with train timetables a a child, spending summers in Switzerland. Game by game.

If you are a Civ fan, or even just a fan of video games, it’s really worth checking out.

I read A Prayer for the Crown-Shy by Becky Chambers. Novella #2 in her #solarpunk monk and robot series. Its also really good. I think the periodical Novella publishing is a really rad model. There needs to be more of it. Because of its length Chambers pulls off the difficult second instalment niceley. Yes we already know the world, and its characters, so this new story doesn’t need to have a novels worths of ideas in it. Instead it has one or two ideas, that are explored fully.

After devouring Chamber’s book, I started listening to Eniac: The Triumphs and Tragedies of the World’s First Computer. As you can probably guess from its title. It’s about the first computer – the one that simulated the hydrogen bomb.

I finished it yesterday. It’s included free with audible membership if this book interests you. Well worth the listen.

Music

zexulo.xyz Spotify Playlist

Inspired by something I read recently, I’ve just been smashing though Terry Riley’s back catalogue. I’ve listened to quite a lot of his work over the years – since university, but going chronologically, though his work back to back, has been a creative revelation.

I found this interview with Terry Riley, conducted just before a 1977 performance of the album Shri Camel really cool.

Remember Kids: