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.
▰ Spent too much time after the first And Just Like That… episode wondering what LPs Big doesn’t own if his collection jumps from Rondstadt to Rundgren. … Also: at the end of the episode, when the thing happens, is the score a super slow take on the Rundgren song played earlier?
▰ “Physicists Discover a Remarkable New Type of Sound Wave” is my kinda clickbait (via Karl Fousek), even if I’m still trying to sort out what the scientists’ findings mean: scitechdaily.com.
▰ Me: Oh, cool, this new laptop has a standard SD slot built in. No more dongles or adapters!
My synthesizer module: Time to update the firmware, so just plug in this microSD card.
▰ Shoutout to whoever crafted the Find My alert for iOS. Sometimes I play it just to hear it.
▰ [pensive instrumental music]
Oh, The Expanse, how I’ve missed you, and how I’ll miss you when these final episodes have run their pan-galactic course.
▰ Hum a few bars and AI’ll transcribe it: “This notebook is an interactive demo of a few music transcription models created by Google’s Magenta team. You can upload audio and have one of our models automatically transcribe it” (colab.research.google.com).
▰ Afternoon trio for light rain, chimney wind, and passing truck with ancient breaks.
▰ I don’t miss the sound of a computer’s fan. I remember with early laptops and physical hard drives, how you could just tell, from the sound of things, when you should wait an extra split second before doing something, ’cause otherwise the whole contraption was gonna blow a gasket. (That’s both metaphorical and accurate.) As for the new laptop, I maybe shouldn’t have waited until the previous one was almost dead to level up, but so it goes.
▰ The Expanse may be my favorite recent-ish (space) science fiction show, if not of all time. (Fringe, Travelers, Counterpart, and Person of Interest, among others, would rank, high, too. They’re just not in space, except to the extent that, you know, Earth is in space.) (And yes, I’ve read all the books, except the ninth/final one. Gonna wait until the season is over, even though the season seems like it’s essentially the sixth book.)
▰ I love the moment in the first episode of the final season of The Expanse when Chrisjen Avasarala, Earther to the core, floats in her room. It’s a beautiful callback to the moment in season four when Naomi Nagata, belter extraordinaire, takes her first steps on an actual planet.(Also, I’m gonna finish Fonda Lee’s new, and final, Jade book before I start the new Expanse one. Both books end their respective series.)
▰ If you spent too much time consuming YouTube videos of neighborhoods in cities around the world, as I do, and loitering in video games to experience virtual approximations, sometimes the bus going by your home in the afternoon can sound like a cue triggered by in-game variables.
▰ Waiting for the Star Wars: Biomes second unit animation director’s cut where they remove the music so it’s actually, you know, the biome. Unless planets in the Star Wars universe actually have music playing naturally all the time. Which, well, would be an interesting environment.
▰ The haiku of lives summarized on Wikipedia’s Deaths in 2021 page:
- Spanish lexicographer
- Italian animation historian
- Australian punk rock guitarist
- Russian microbiologist and politician
▰ Hopeful that an updated Splinter Cell means a remastered Amon Tobin score and a whole new remix album: “A ‘Splinter Cell’ remake is underway” (engadget.com).
▰ The use of Nokia AI to gauge vehicle noise pollution in Genk is interesting, though it might just punish people who can’t afford electric cars: “Nokia Brings IoT and AI to Bear on Vehicle-Based Noise Pollution in Genk Smart City Trial Program” (hackster.io).
▰ The Disquiet Junto has been around for 520 weeks. If our planet didn’t wobble around the sun, the Junto would turn 10 years old today (December 16, 2021), but various leap years and related incongruences mean the anniversary will occur on January 6.
▰ The kids are alright. Ethan Hein reports: “For her final project in music tech class, one student did a seamless mashup of all of her projects from the semester. That is a classic Disquiet Junto move, and I didn’t even prompt it! But maybe I should assign everyone to do that.”
▰ “Her pronunciation revealed an accent that would tear itself to shreds on razor wire if the authorities ever found the time to build a fence around Buenos Aires.” from Savage Theories by Pola Oloixarac
via Stephen Beachy via Alvin Lu
▰ Two records I’ve listened to for decades are Bitches Brew (Miles Davis) and Money Jungle (Ellington/Mingus/Roach). I love ’em both. Bitches Brew has gotten mellow, even comforting, as time has passed, whereas Money Jungle sounds more aggressive and complex with each passing year.
▰ Got a new TV, replacing the one from 2008. Higher rez, thinner, larger screen in same dimensions. Best thing? It makes no sound when turned on. With the old one, it was a challenge to hit the mute button at the right moment so the room wasn’t filled with an egregious twhmoomp.
▰ And on that note, have a good weekend.
Let your home appliances serenade you.
Take a nap in white noise’s embrace.
Pay attention to whether that novel you’re reading (or writing?) pays as much attention to sound as it does to sight and touch.