A Complete Person

In the past week or so, I’ve been unfollowing accounts across all social platforms. I even (to my own surprise) removed some blogs from my feed reader. It wasn’t triggered by anything in particular that these accounts posted, said, or did. I just felt the need to trim down and prune the broader media ecology I’ve gathered around me.

This reminds me of what I wrote at the end of 2022 about ‘Stepping Away From Noise‘. It was a personal behavior I aimed to cultivate and embrace. Earlier this year, I expanded on that idea in a post about ‘Strategic Indifference‘—a two-step dance: one step toward what matters, one step away from what doesn’t. An advanced form of stepping away, really.

I genuinely feel like I’m nearing the end of a long period or cycle in my life. It’s been a journey of Avoiding news (something I wrote about in 2018) and taking control of my attention. There’s a great deal of froth and blather in the wider cultural and psychic domain that I simply don’t care about anymore.

I’ve managed to extract myself from the clutches of social media and learned not to have an oversized emotional reaction to things happening in the wider world that I can do nothing about. Maybe this is just getting older, but it’s been a six-year process of figuring out where I stand and who I am in relation to this vast semiotic megastructure that is culture. Learning how to feel was a first step., which evolved into a practice of say.act.feel.

One thing I’ve noticed about writing and posting online week after week, year after year, is that a body of work is produced through the work of the body. Thoughts and ideas get laid down, posted, and as time progresses, threads of thought emerge. You can only really see them all in hindsight, like when you pull on a loose thread from a jumper and it reveals how it weaves through the fabric.

Everything I post here is a draft—a way of ‘thinking in public.’ It’s a public note to self. I know that some people who consider themselves ‘writers’ struggle with the informality of this medium in practice. Even those who write a lot of Substack newsletters can fall into the trap of thinking, ‘I must have something to say.’ You can write whatever you want on the Internet most people in fact do! It doesn’t need to be perfect. It doesn’t even need to be finished, or edited.

As of now, this blog contains over three-quarters of a million words. At the rate things are going, it won’t be long until it reaches a million. That’s a lot of thinking and writing in public. It’s a lot of documenting my life, writing about the things I’ve been thinking, doing, making, creating, reading, and listening to.

I have purposefully resisted the urge to ‘niche’ down. To turn this blog, or my podcast into a single subject show. Which I think/know has cost me in terms of ‘legibility’. But I don’t mind really. I’d rather be a complete person on the Internet, than a shallow slice chasing clout on a topic (Something I know that I could have done several times over the years had I wanted to)

I’ve gained quite a few new subscribers recently, and I often wonder what they must think of all this after stumbling upon my website. Every viewer might be a new reader. So, I try to link to other posts in newer ones (as I have above) to embed my current ‘public thoughts’ in a hyper-contextual web of older ‘public thoughts.’ Doing this makes the blog more solid, almost sculptural. It becomes a piece or place of hyper media.

I am very grateful that its all here in one place, searchable and to some extent mostly well organised by category. Even though there’s plenty I choose not to share—like a burlesque or fan dance, revealing only what I want—it still feels more authentic than anything I could ever post on social media. But then again maybe its a confused mess?

Social media, with its short-form content and fleeting interactions, just doesn’t hold my interest anymore. It lacks the depth and permanence the I value, and how I engage with the world. Here, on this blog, I can explore ideas fully, document my journey, and build something that lasts. It’s where I feel most at home online, where I can be myself—both revealing and reserved, public and private.

So, while I continue to prune and refine my digital landscape – and how I interact with it, this blog will remain a constant. This is my corner of the internet, and I’m glad it’s all here in one place.

Experience.Computer

Meghna Jayanth – Experience.Computer

Experience.Computer: Jay Springett leads award-winning narrative designer, and writer Meghna Jayanth through a series of imaginative exercises.

Episode 2 of Season 2 of my interview podcast went out this week. This month I lead award-winning narrative designer, and writer Meghna Jayanth through a series of imaginative exercises:

ABOUT THE GUEST

MEGHNA JAYANTH is an award-winning narrative designer, writer and speaker. Her work is focused on subverting the capitalist-colonialist fantasies, pleasures and designs that dominate the imaginaries of video games, and rethinking protagonism.

Her work includes Thirsty Suitors, 80 Days, Sable, Horizon: Zero Dawn, Boyfriend Dungeon, This War of Mine and Sunless Sea. She is currently working on All Rise, an inappropriately joyous game about climate crisis and corporate criminals.

Permanently Moved

Cathedral of Screens

Thoughts From An Apple Store

Full Show Notes: https://zexulo.xyz/2024/08/31/2421-cathedral-of-screens/

 Experience.Computer: https://experience.computer/

• Worldrunning.guide: https://worldrunning.guide/
• Subscriber Zine! https://startselectreset.com/

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

Subscribe to the Podcast: https://permanentlymoved.online/

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Photo 365

The Ministry Of My Own Labour

• Attended an AGM in advisory capacity
• Lots of SEKRET project thinking – some notes – on hold till burning man ends
• More work on the long essays/zines – nearly finished first draft of part 2
• Long call about Roblox and culture
• Recorded for Wolf pod

Terminal Access

I really enjoyed the long read Toward AI Realism by Holly Lewis in Spectre Journal. Well worth opening in a new tab and spending some time with the whole essay.

Capital is not aiming to produce self-aware machines. Firms that give little thought to the rich internal lives of their meat-bag workers probably aren’t overly concerned about developing machines with deep thoughts. The hope seems to be for obedient, cost-cutting, productive things. And also for destructive things.

StampFans

I wrote a quick note on the blog this week about physical newsletter service StampFans:

StampFans, which launched in February is another sign that the ‘Real things for real people‘ culture that I want to be a part of, create and participate in, is growing.

Dipping the Stacks

Cultural Stasis Produces Fewer Cheesy Relics like Rocky IV

are artists themselves choosing to reduce aesthetic risk-taking in their art? In an era where past and present songs all exist on the same Spotify playlist, few musical artists would want to create songs that may be ridiculed as passé a few years later. And all artists have the historical knowledge that helps them avoid mistakes of the past like Rocky IV. But this result — a lack of embarrassing relics — is what makes us feel that culture is less healthy.

Three pass writing

I don’t exactly outline, but I do write in some sort of iterative top-down way. I’d already noticed that I tend to write in three rough passes for most of my writing, both technical writing and blog posts. This isn’t some method I stick rigidly to, it just seems to work out that way for me. In practice there’s some mixing between the passes, but they’re still pretty distinct.

The World Is Assuming A Pre-War Posture

Recent talk of a new Cold War has already subsided as applied historians instead invoke the more ominous experience of rigid alliance systems in Europe being drawn into world war in 1914 by incidents at the margins of empire.

Inventing the Roleplaying Game: The First “Game Master”

Gary Gygax and David Arneson are credited as the creators of D&D in 1974, it would be incorrect to say that they created the practice of tabletop roleplaying – the roots of which trace back to tabletop wargames and board games

Your phone is why you don’t feel sexy

But, like an old iPhone battery, the vital charge that used to fuel our lives is trending precipitously downwards. Our phones aren’t solely to blame for the lack of sexy vibes in the world, but they play a central role. Nothing about our phones is sexy—from the things they allow us to do, to how they feel to use, to what they ultimately symbolize.

This wasn’t always the case.

Reading

Still reading Dead Famous: An Unexpected History of Celebrity from Bronze Age to Silver Screen by Greg Jenner

Still reading Puppets, Gods, and Brands: Theorizing the Age of Animation from Taiwan by Teri J. Silvio

Both these books are much longer than I thought when I started them on kindle!

I needed something to switch my brain off so I finally got round to listening to the 40k book Wrath of the Lost by Chris Forrester.

This morning I was out of bed late, because I burnt through ALL of Barret Brown’ prison memoir My Glorious Defeats: Hacktivist, Narcissist, Anonymous: A Memoir. Read it all in one sitting. Great book.

OAK – Woodfolk

Recently discovered Bristol based ‘drone folk’ band WoodFolk. Their 2024 EP OAK is fantastic. It’s very English, but the pump bellows are replaced by looped guitar drones.

Exactly the sort of music that needs to get made, and needs doing in our current era. It’s absolutely fantastic music.

Remember Kids: