/reader

A) You read thejaymo.net via RSS
B) You found your way directly to the page via my blog

Blogging is a medium, and within that medium there are styles of blogging – well covered 22 years ago I The Weblog Handbook!

With the death of Web2, I’ve been feeling the need to change my own style of blogging for a while. Make my site/domain the only place I really post to on the Internet.

Over the last few years – Colin Walker quipped in an email a while ago – thejaymo.net is a blog that’s ‘stable with a clear sense of identity’. The reason for that stability has been technical rather than though any design of my own.

For as long as this blog has existed, I’ve used the Jetpack plugin to generate an email version of my posts that gets zapped to people subscribed via email as a ‘newsletter’.

But the definition of newsletters and what is expected from an email subscription/notification has changed dramatically over the last half decade. And along side that cultural change, so has changed the number of people subscribed to this blog via email. As my email list grew, so did my anxiety about the sorts of things I was writing and posting to my blog.

Peoples inboxes are a private space and should be respected. I didn’t want to suddenly change my ‘communication style’ and flood people’s inboxes with emails when they had come to expect a certain stability of receiving my podcast, weeknotes + other occasional posts via email. That just felt like a massive breach of trust.

BUT! Jetpack have just introduced a ‘post only‘ function! Which – with this test post – should mean that this post should only appear on my blog and in my RSS feed, and not get zapped into peoples inboxes.

For people subscribed to my blog via email, nothing is going to change. The stable cadence of podcast and weeknotes emails will be maintained. The only major change will be the addition of a new section to my weeknotes, linking to posts I’ve made (if any) during the week.

But for those of you subscribed via RSS there’ll be more casual posts from me incoming. Bare with me as I develop and explore what I want to do.

RSS Club

There are many kinds of RSS Club, this one is mine.

RSS Club started on the Indieweb in late 2022, with Dave Rupert leading the charge:

Congratulations on joining a secret society! If you’re reading this, that means my message has been transmitted successfully. This post is only available to you, Reader, through the ancient peer-to-peer syndication medium of RSS. I hope you are enjoying reading it in your Web 2.0 era feed reader.

RSS club has some rules:

1st rule of RSS Club is “Don’t Talk About RSS Club”.

2nd rule of RSS Club is “Don’t Share on Social Media”.

3rd rule of RSS Club is “Provide Value”.

Don’t talk about it. Let people find it. Make it worthwhile.

But I’m not exactly one for rules:

Some RSS Club bloggers hide their RSS only posts from the front end of their site entirely. I won’t be doing that.

And as always, if you ever see anything of value here feel free to link to it or share it!

What RSS Club (for me) really means, is a bifurcation of my online readership into newsletter subscribers and rss subscribers.

Long time bloggers (You know who you are) are reading this in your RSS readers right now probably thinking: *wait what Jay’s making a big song and dance about posting more on his blog and the big deal is that some of those posts won’t be sent out as emails ?*

And you’d be correct. I’M FREE.

Until the the other day, I have been technically unable to post more on my blog without fear of spamming peoples inboxes.

Plus, as long time readers will know I LOVE RSS: Here Are Some Posts About RSS. At the end of the day. I just wanna post more, and having those posts flow out into RSS readers and not into your email. Besides it’s what RSS is for after all, taming the firehose.

RSS is a more casual feed destination than email or social media. It’s lack of stats or any kind of feedback is just what I need now that i’m flying blind on that front. I’ll press publish and it’ll goes out onto the blog and out to my RSS. Nice.

Speaking of RSS. I recently installed Matt Webb’s pretty-feed-v3.xsl on the site.

It’s restyled my RSS/Atom feed, making it friendly for humans viewers. It’s also cool that includes a link to his fantastic resource aboutfeeds.com.

As a totally not technical person I ended up installing Matthias Pfefferle‘s pretty feeds plugin from github and i’m really happy with it.

Anyways, here’s to my new found freedom from email notifications 🍻

This has been an RSS Club post.
Syndicated to you, really simply, from thejaymo.net

The post Welcome to RSS Club 🟧 appeared first on thejaymo.

 

• Where Interests Take You
• Forest Bed
• Permanently Moved
• Photo 365
• The Ministry Of My Own Labour
• Terminal Access
• Dipping the Stacks
• Reading
• Music
• Remember Kids:

I was at band practice most of today (see below) and I still need to eat dinner and then I need to jump on a call with Dougald Hine to speak with him for his Sunday School Sessions. He wrote a lovely little thing about our friendship and on going dialogues as an intro to the call later. So just a quick one from me today.

Where Interests Take You

I’ve been thinking about how the longer I go from spending time on social media, the more wide open my media diet is becoming. My digital media diet still remains similar as its always been, consuming work by peers and friends. And panning the streams.

But not being on social media has given me so much time and brain space back. It’s all just so nice. So I’ve been reading even more than usual the last few months since I got back from Thailand, and reading across a far broader range of interests.

I’ve added more history of computing books on the TBR pile, I’ve just started The New New Journalism: Conversations with America’s Best Nonfiction Writers on Their Craft by Robert Boynton. And for no reason at all other than this is where my interests are taking me, I’m thinking about reading a biography of Eisenhower I found in Oxfam next.

The main thing I’m noticing is the pivot to long form. perhaps I want this to define the rest of my year. Blog posts are better than tweets, but books beat everything. There is something about a long sustained argument and unfolding of narrative that I find super appealing as an antidote to the speed of the social web.

Solarpunk seems to be a bit of a theme for me this year, so I’m going to me make it a focus. I’d like to re-engage with some of the recent pop literature on climate and ecosystems restoration etc – I stopped reading it all in 2020.

Can anyone recommend something good? Comments open below.

Forest Bed

My band Forest Bed is playing the legendary Whats Cookin’ in Leytonstone on Wednesday (24th)!!!

We’re supporting Scott Mickelson, who is over from the USA on tour. His first album was Grammy Balloted so its a real honour to be opening up for him in London! It’s our first support slot opening for a out of big out of town band, so we’re going to do our best to do London’s alt-folk-rock / cosmic Americana scene proud! (admittedly its a small scene).

Another date for your diaries, is we’ll be playing Lambstock 2024 in Surbiton on the 1st June. No times or details yet, but its one of the best weekends of live music in my local area. Come down and hang out south of the river!

Permanently Moved

Little Wars of the Worlds

A review of HG Wells’ most important work, Little Wars. The book that changed the way table top war games were played and paved the way for the development of role-playing and modern war games.

Full Show Notes: https://www.thejaymo.net/2024/04/20/2405-little-wars-of-the-worlds/

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

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Photo 365

The Ministry Of My Own Labour

• Started the edit/re-write of part 2 of Writing The Impossible Object essay
• Wrote a big PDF on the ‘state of things’ for a compnay I may be involved with
• Recorded TWO experience.computer interviews
• Band practice
• Prepped for Call with Dougald
• Started work my Solarpunk Talk for June
• Calls. So many calls that are leading no where work wise 🙁

Terminal Access

Dré Labre over at Design Fiction Daily has just released a super nice Comfy UI tool for stable diffusion called Trace Transform:

a versatile tool for supercharging one’s imagination, it can be used to speed up your creative workflow and come up with some novel future imaginings to inspire design fiction.

Dre and I have chatted a few times about stable diffusion workflows and its really cool to see that his has become robust enough to become a product!

Dipping the Stacks

The Incredible Psychodrama That Is Millions Of Helldivers 2 Players Versus One Guy Named Joel – Aftermath

“We have done an emergency expansion to the GM’s team,” Baskin said. “He’s only one guy, and he was just not sleeping. I remember over the launch weekend, he was sending me messages at 4am because we were the only ones still awake.”
Baskin went on to say that Joel has “a lot of advisors.”

Walden Pond

Walden Pond is a little paper zine that comes once a month in the mail ✉. It’s full of a selection of the articles you’ve saved to Pocket, so you know that you’re interested in everything inside.

Seems cool?

Who Killed Prestige TV? Toward a “Good Fan” Theory of Television ‹ Literary Hub

Peak TV draws its audience in to a Spotified relationship to art. For a low, low price, lightly bundled streamers offer personalization in lieu of experimentation. And even when new ground seems broken, TV is undercut by the binging style of its consumption.

Interview with Raph Koster: The Declaration of Rights of Avatars – Fieldnotes from the Metaverse

From the beginning everybody intuitively spoke about virtual worlds as places. Nobody thought of them as being like a party line call. Nobody thought of them as being pieces of software. We casually spoke about “being there.” Everything was using metaphors of ”placeness”, of movement, of embodiment, but none of the legal views reflected that.

How A Small Video Game Narrative Studio Wound Up At The Heart Of A Massive, Anti-Woke Conspiracy Theory – Aftermath

While the Sweet Baby conspiracy theory has picked up steam among larger content creators in recent weeks – leading to trending topics on Twitter and millions of views on YouTube – many of those who’ve propagated it over the past few months demonstrably have no idea how game development works.

Reading

I finished The Essential Letters 1936 – 2004 by Alistair Cooke. I grew up with Cooke on the radio, on a Sunday morning both Mum and Dad were big fans. Its a mammoth audiobook, but well worth a listen. I can’t get over his 2,869 broadcasts over nearly 58 years. What an achievement. I thought 250+ eps of 301 was good going! lol

I fired up The Chapter’s Due by Graham McNeill. Book 6 and currently the last book in the Ultramarines series focused on the space marine Uriel Ventris. Its more of the same pulpy 40k nonsense. LOL.

I started reading The Breathing Book: A Practical Guide to Natural Breathing by Brad Thompson on my kindle this week. Been on there for ages since it was referenced in the Feldenkrais book I read a while ago. It is quite a good practical book, aimed at western people who have never really encountered other breathing modalities.

Also started The New New Journalism: Conversations with America’s Best Nonfiction Writers on Their Craft by Robert Boynton.

Music

Spotify Playlist

• Spotify

Claire Rousay – Sentiment

I guess the album of the week is Swift’s desperate ongoing attempt to become lana del ray, but the album that I’ve had the most conversations about is Claire Rousay’s (previously on the blog) emo album Sentiment

It’s the inevitable fusion of the current emo revival and the ambient trends in contemporary electronica. Low midwest riffs, strings, autotuned vocals and vocoda’s. It’s dreamy and shoegazy. Tracks also incorporate birdsong and other field recordings.

Headline track on the album is probably lover’s spit plays in the background:

But I also have a real soft spot for please 5 more minutes (feat. Lala Lala). its wonderful octave guitar parts, synth, field recordings and autotune.

She’s playing at the ICA next month on the 29th. I think I might grab a ticket and go ticket for one – unless anyone is up for coming with me?

Remember Kids:

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A review of HG Wells’ most important work, Little Wars. The book that changed the way table top war games were played and paved the way for the development of role-playing and modern war games.

Full Show Notes: https://www.thejaymo.net/2024/04/20/2405-little-wars-of-the-worlds/

Support the show! 
Subscribe to my zine
Watch on Youtube

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

April 20, 2024

|

Permanently Moved 🔊 | Review 📃 | World Running 🌐

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Subscribe

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Little Wars of the Worlds

I have finally gotten around to reading HG Wells’ most important book – Little Wars.

Or to give the full 1913 title upon publication: ‘Little Wars: a game for boys from twelve years of age to one hundred and fifty and for that more intelligent sort of girl who likes boys’ games and books.’

Which unfortunately sort of set the tone of wargaming towards women for the next 110+ years. And as for other social and cultural sensitivities, the book goes downhill from page one. In fact, my 2015 reprint has a note in the front matter forewarning the reader “that the text in places contains cultural references characteristic of the era, which may be deemed offensive by modern standards.” All that aside, Wells’ Little Wars still influences tabletop wargames today. 

The book began life as two articles published in ‘Windsor Magazine’ in December 1912 and January 1913. Little Wars and Floor Games. Apparently after their publication, the publisher Frank Palmer approached Wells and asked if a book might not be written on the subject of boy’s games.

The story goes that Wells soon showed up unannounced at Palmer’s office in Bloomsbury lugging huge boxes filled with lead soldiers, bottle brush trees and other terrain. Interrupting a meeting between Palmer and author R. Thurston Hopkins, he proceeded to crawl around on his hands and knees extolling the virtues of the game from the office carpet for over three hours. Finally, an exhausted Palmer (and presumably Hopkins) gave Wells a contract. Behaviour that sets the tone for how wargame nerds enthuse about their hobby to innocent social victims to this day too.

Little Wars marks the moment when toy soldiers had becoming serious objects. Wells explains that when he was a boy, toy soldiers used to be flat – pressed and stamped out from tin sheets with bent tabs to allow them to stand. Whereas by the 1910’s they were now hollow cast, painted and mass produced. He describes the toy soldiers as “magnificent beings”. And calls the advances in production as an “enormous improvement in our national physique in this respect.” He also effervesces about the vast collections of models that people can amass.

As an aside; in a consulting conversation the other day about worlds and IP, Warhammer and Games Workshop came up. I pointed out that it was Citadel Miniatures and not IP that built the company. GW is above all, an engineering firm. In the business of selling war dollies made with cutting edge injection plastic moulding machines.

Anyways.

Wells’ Little Wars of course do differ from tabletop wargames as we know them today. Primarily, battles are fought using actual projectiles rather than dice roles to resolve combat. In the Victorian period, the cost of mechanical springs fell dramatically. Making them economical for the inclusion in toys. Wells writes: “The beginning of the game of Little War, as we know it, became possible with the invention of the spring breechloader gun.” Some elements of the rules are recognisable to us today, like the deployment phase. But our familiarity is soon shattered with the requirement of a curtain to be hung in the middle of the arena whilst the players set up their armies. The combat phase then follows exactly like you would imagine. With the clicking of buttons and the firing of tiny projectiles across the room towards their targets. Presumably whilst making pew pew noises the whole time.

Despite the subject matter Wells’ lifelong pacifism is on display throughout the book. He says that wargames are a “homoeopathic remedy for the imaginative strategist. Here is the premeditation, the thrill, the strain of accumulating victory or disaster—and no smashed nor sanguinary bodies, no shattered fine buildings nor devastated country sides”. Published one year before World War 1, Wells seems prescient in writing: “Great War is at present, I am convinced, not only the most expensive game in the universe, but it is a game out of all proportion. Not only are the masses of men and material and suffering and inconvenience too monstrously big for reason but—the available heads we have for it, are too small. That, I think, is the most pacific realisation conceivable, and Little War brings you to it as nothing else but Great War can do.”

The book closes with an appendix on the military simulation Kriegspiel – German for War-game or War-play – and a tributary further up the timeline in my book on the history of worlds.

Wells notes that after the publication of the original articles, many military men got in touch. Kriegspiel they said “as it is played by the British Army, is a very dull and unsatisfactory exercise, lacking in realism, in stir and the unexpected, obsessed by the umpire at every turn”. Whilst protesting that as a civilian, Kriegspiel is not his ‘proper business’ Wells, like any good wargamer goes on to suggest advanced rules to be played in a larger space involving military logistics, military engineers, cavalry charges, and railway transport of troops etc – a complexification of the base simulation.

One I was of course, reading with an eye toward any mention of worlds. And found; within a discussion of terrain, this:

“These we arrange and rearrange in various ways upon our floor, making a world of them. In doing so we have found out all sorts of pleasant facts, and also many undesirable possibilities” Another early hit at something  – the worlds as a medium – are doing for us today.

All in all, despite its quite shocking casual racism, it’s an interesting book.

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