Note from Jay: A few people have mentioned recently that the email newsletter version of these Weeknotes are often too long and get cut off in their inbox.
So… This week I’m trialling a Read More button. Please do let me know if you think its in the right place?
If you have any strong opinions about this reply directly or comment below the post.
Nearly Finished Business
Since the start of the year, I’ve been on a bit of a mission, an unburdening. One aspect of which has been to finish all the books I had in progress.
When I was younger, and especially back when I worked in a bookshop, I never left a book unfinished. As a kid books were too expensive to acquire to be left unread. And then when I worked at Borders, my commute was long, so I had the time. Once I’d started something, I’d see it through, It would be finished within a day or two, so big deal.
But somewhere in my mid to late twenties, I dropped my whole “must finish every book” attitude. A combination of more disposable income and less free time. So I regularly began putting things down. Plus my tastes shifted. Finding that a lot of fiction (unless it’s mindless warhammer lol) was no longer for me. For example I stopped reading the Booker Prize winner every year in my early 30’s.
Then the pandemic happened. And suddenly, the binary of “I’ll finish this” vs “nah, not for me” gave way into a more dangerous third category: books I “fully intend to finish… eventually.”
Over the last half decade, they stacked up. That teetering pile of shame, my tsundoku habit, quietly expanded until I had over 20 books left in limbo.
So since Christmas I’ve been steadily clearing them out. The Kindle backlog is now down to just one book in progress. I have just one audible audiobook left. And just two Academic deep dives remain. The end is in sight.
The whole process over the last few months has felt less like a todo list item and more like a kind of cognitive shedding. An offloading of obligations.
Since I got back from holiday, this has prompted another deep spring clean. I’ve been thinking more honestly about my creative projects—particularly the medium-to-large ones I’ve started and never finished. Some of these have absorbed hundreds of hours of my time.
So, I’ve archived the lot. Filed away in google drive or in an Obsidian folder called Compost.
These include: Two half-finished novels. A pair of novellas. Motion-tracking software for my shadow puppets and 3D depth camera in Unity. A video essay. A few games design projects like my boardgame KELPING HANDS: A Solarpunk inspired ecosystem management game game about Sea Lions, Sea Urchins and Kelp Forests. Plus a Lazers & Feelings RPG set in a market garden.
I haven’t binned them, it’s more like I’ve… given them back to the mulch.
All thats left are a handful of projects of different sizes with a clear scope, energy, and momentum. Things I can actually finish along side how life is shaping up this year.
Suddenly everything feels more directed. I’m thinking differently now about destinations. What I’m making for, and why.
I’ve written before about struggling with medium- and long-term projects piling up. But this recent exercise really does feel like a turning point.
It’s been four years since I told my self I was going to Plan to Finish. The sort of attitude I needed to adopt. But now, for the first time, I actually feel it! Rather than just as an intellectual position about what I should be doing.
Finish some books, make space for what’s next.
On The Blog:
You may remember I posted about Jetpack’s Social notes the other week? Well, one of the Devs at Automattic replied to my post and I need to email them back! Thats cool no?
I did a bit of janitorial work on the blog this week and updated my default sharing image for posts that don’t have a featured image. this also includes my home page. it looks like this
Its a first attempt at trying to define what the blog might feel like when I do a big re-theme later this year!
Sitting This One Out
When you compress personal writing to these extremes, what emerges is something like a prose poem, or a lyric essay. But neither of those terms quite captures it. Instead, it feels like a distinctly stylised kind of prose—a form of online writing that borrows tone, pacing, and emotional resonance from poetry, with the clarity and contemplation of non-fiction essays. Close relatives might be found in newsletter culture, blog posts-as-art, or even podcast monologues.
I wrote a prose poem/lyric essay about whats going on right now.
Its about social media and feeling the urge to … Post.
Marking the Occasion
I wrote some notes on what it means to me to have a blog in 2025
I wrote a long post last year reflecting on the 15th anniversary of this website, but let it’s ‘Sweet Sixteen‘ last month pass by unremarked.
Still, this popped up this morning: 15 years at WordPress.com.
Permanently Moved
Leaving Worlds Behind
To run a world is to be responsible for its edges as much as its centre. Its ending must be part of the design. A World Runner tends to its aliveness, yes, but also to its thresholds. To its arrivals, and the departures.
Full Show Notes: https://zexulo.xyz/2025/04/12/2508-leaving-worlds-behind/
- 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/
Quarterly zine; my gift to you ✉️
Photo 365
The Ministry Of My Own Labour
- Rewrote the introduction to my big zine on journaling games.
- Added 4.5k of new text to my SLOP MACHINES text.
- Finished SSRZ013 its going out tomorrow.
- Couple of long assed calls about games design docs and press kits.
- Extended the notification system in my interactive fiction game i’m making
Terminal Access
I highly recommend spending some time watching this history of the Chinese company Xiaomi, and how their car devision came about. “An EV is just a smartphone on wheels”
Dipping the Stacks
In Which I Declare War On Beloved Entertainer Bo Burnham
This subculture’s influence hit its apex in 2020 and entered its death throes with the 2024 election and the slow degradation of the platform previously known as Twitter. I think Inside, in ways both intentional and unintentional, perfectly demonstrated why.
The Tumblr regime was coded feminine, and its primary means of exercising social coercion was the work of the corbeau — the denunciation of others, often carried out anonymously, for their past transgressions against what were often only recently confected social norms. The power of such denunciations is by now virtually exhausted
Turkle: How Computers Change the Way We Think (2004)
PowerPoint does more than provide a way of transmitting content. It carries its own way of thinking, its own aesthetic — which not surprisingly shows up in the aesthetic of college freshmen. In that aesthetic, presentation becomes its own powerful idea.
How an Audiobook Narrator Organizes Her Days
I’m an audiobook narrator, which is a job people always freak out in excitement when they hear about. “Oh I’ve always wanted just to read books all day!” Haha, well, me too. But it’s truly a business and a job.
The Black Hole of My Mind: Discovering Aphantasia as an Ayahuasquero
If most people are generating imagery on command all the time, it’s no wonder they sometimes get confused about what’s a vision and what’s just “in their head.” I never understood that struggle—because for me, if I see something, it’s extremely meaningful.
Reading
I finished my re-read of Say What You Mean: A Mindful Approach to Nonviolent Communication by Oren Jay Sofer. This book had a huge positive impact on my life in 2023 I decided for various reasons to read it again. Still 5 stars. Still really good.
Now I’m finally finishing Ball’s Metaverse hybebeast book.
Music
Anatole Muster – Wonderful Now
Not really sure how to describe this album other than “what if jazz accordionist but make it hyperpop”. Is Jazztronica even a word? Look you just all need to listen to this album. The track Girl in My Dreams sounds like midwest zoomer emo mixed with drum and bass. It’s all VERY 2025 and leaves me both equally excited and confused on my first listen.
Jazzwise.com hated it — as you can imagine.
Remember Kids:
Determining “what the deal is with the crazy world I am in” recast the object of the game from gaining in power to resolving a mystery.
The Elusive Shift by Jon Peterson
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