I do this manually each Saturday, collating most of the tweets I made the past week at twitter.com/disquiet, which I think of as my public notebook. Some tweets pop up in expanded form or otherwise on Disquiet.com sooner. It’s personally informative to revisit the previous week of thinking out loud.
▰ Trio for laptop fan, street cleaner, and microwave
▰ Reading the new John le Carré very slowly, thanks for asking. Hard to believe it’s the last one. I’m just over 40% through, taking it a step at a time. When it’s over it’s over.
▰ A lot of ist’s passed away, per the Deathsin2021 page on Wikipedia:
Italian aerodynamicist
Ukrainian sociologist
English music journalist
Italian germanist
Olympic silver medallist
▰ Not that it’s over, but at this juncture I’d say the sound of the pandemic for me is that of people skateboarding by my home in the depth of a silence previously unimaginable, even in our fairly quiet neighborhood. And even as the world has woken up, I still hear the skateboards.
▰ “Twitter removes the trust between writer and reader by flattening meaning to the single most offensive understanding and proliferating that version alone.”
I remain Twitter-ambivalent, and I mute/circumscribe my use diligently. Here’s a smart depiction of the tightrope walk by novelist Fonda Lee, whose Jade trilogy I recommend highly: “Twitter Is the Worst Reader.”
▰ “What will you do when you get lonely / No one waiting by your side?”
Hold music is trolling me again.
▰ Pretty interesting overview of the “hearing aid cartel,” which is not a Gen X indie-rock supergroup, but instead the power structure that helps explain why the common devices apparently cost so much in the United States: “Silencing the Competition: Inside the Fight Against the Hearing Aid Cartel.”
▰ The cognitive dissonance that you’ve elected to turn off your microphone in a given piece of software, and yet the software hears you well enough to tell you, essentially, “You seem to be making sound, so would you like to turn your microphone back on?”
▰ Been thinking about no longer tagging people’s music on disquiet.com as “freely downloadable” (which I only have done when it’s with the musician’s approval), ’cause in the age of streaming, it seems to mean far less than it did, once upon a pre-fiber, pre-DSL time.
▰ Been often using my own photos instead of Creative Commons shots for Junto projects, and I’m enjoying it. I may just stick with that. We’ll see. This week’s project is an example. And it just went live, though I need to now send out the email.
▰ My mode, generally speaking: one ebook, one physical book, one audiobook. Ever-shifting, never remotely in sync. (Doesn’t count graphic novels and poetry, which are read at sort of a different pace. Or at least are by me. Kind of faster, sometimes less so, but just different.)
▰ And on that note, have a good weekend:
Listen to a book you read a long time ago.
Take a walk while wearing noise-cancelling headphones, with no music, and embrace the dissociation.
Leave Shazam running during a TV show and check what songs you did and didn’t notice.