I do this manually each week, collating tweets I made at twitter.com/disquiet, my public notebook. Some tweets pop up (in expanded form) on Disquiet.com sooner. It’s personally informative to revisit the previous week of thinking out loud.
▰ I ask myself, “What will I reward myself with if I don’t look at Twitter or Facebook all weekend?”
On Monday, I understand that the true reward is that I didn’t look at Twitter or Facebook all weekend.
▰ Doppler effect in full effect at the track in Golden Gate Park, various cyclists flying by with their individual soundtracks blaring, varying speeds allowing for occasional generative mashups as the after-work crew gains in number.
▰ Hyperlocal breaking news, but Sichuan Home on Geary in San Francisco now makes its own sausage. With respect to the vegans who may stumble on this tweet, the image is at instagram.com/dsqt.
▰ Prepping for one of the best cultural holidays of the year, Eric Ducker notes the 20th anniversary of Aphex Twin’s “Avril 14th”: nytimes.com.
▰ Witness in all its monospace beauty as Lil Data brings Aphex Twin’s “Avril 14th” to life one typed character at a time: twitter.com/lildata. The source code (in TidalCycles) is at github.com/jarmitage.
▰ Phase 1: I was definitely not expecting an acoustic guitar Misfits campfire singalong on Mayans M.C. this week.
Phase 2: And even that didn’t prepare me for the GG Allin campfire singalong that came later in the episode.
▰ #protip You can mute (and even block) every account whose advertisements pop up in your Twitter feed. (I can’t imagine this option won’t go away at some point, so enjoy it while you’ve got it.)
▰ Car alarms never actually stop. They simply pause before starting again.
“If two analyses done in the 1990s still hold, 95 to 99 percent of all car-alarm triggerings are literally false alarms.”
If I can sort out which car it is, I’m going to print out this Ilana E. Strauss article and put it on the windshield: theatlantic.com.
I believe the end of this particular car alarm scenario will resemble the end (spoiler!) of Agatha Christie’s Murder on the Orient Express, when the entire neighborhood lines up to destroy the car in question.
Car alarms are, in effect, a weaponized rendition of John Cage’s 4’33”. Rather than frame silence with a mime-like depiction of the formal structure of a piano recital, one demarcates its temporal and qualitative boundaries with annoying, thoughtless, grating, high-volume bleats.
I’ll say, on the ninth or tenth round of the alarm going off since 5:57am today, I’ve come to admire the professionalism of whoever devised the horn. It cuts through walls, glass, bone, and the comfort of one’s own living space. Someone got a PhD in acoustics of crying babies.
At this point, much of this block must now be deep in some sort of shared hyperspeed PTSD, as we all await the inevitable return of the car alarm going off. Before, there was silence when the alarm stopped. Now there is just a premonition of noise.
9:42: I’m working from home, and I’ve got a ton to do, and some calls, but I guess I’ll just keep live-tweeting this car alarm from the comfort of my couch until someone sets the vehicle on fire.
11:32: Interesting. The car alarm has not sounded again since 9:42. Likely the car has been moved and is mundanely terrorizing another neighborhood.
1:31pm: The car alarm has returned. Someone finished their errands, apparently. They forgot to purchase earmuffs for the rest of us.
It’s 7:39am the next day and there’s been no alarm since my previous tweet in this thread, but I recognize that the dense electronic signal ecology of modern life in combination with the fragile ego circuitry of car alarms means simply tweeting this may set it off again.
▰ Having the cover of your current book as your Kindle’s lockscreen will be great. But since getting what you’ve wanted is rarely enough, now I’ll want a quick process to turn the Kindle lockscreen into a to-do list, calendar, or some other single-page document.
▰ Perhaps not all of my confusion is the result of pandemic brain:
The Last of Us
Among Us
Them
Us
This Is Us