For some time now, I’ve done this manually each Saturday, usually in the morning over coffee: collating most of the tweets I made the preceding week at twitter.com/disquiet, which I’ve long thought of as my public notebook. This week I’m folding in some from Mastodon, where I hang at post.lurk.org/@disquiet, because I’m spending more time there than on Twitter these days. Mastodon is an awkward beast, but the web was at its best when it was awkward, so maybe that awkwardness is a good thing, or a sign of a good thing. I said maybe.
What appears here isn’t a full accounting. Often there are, for example, conversations online that don’t really make as much sense out of the context of social media itself. Some of my notes pop up sooner in expanded form or otherwise on Disquiet.com. And sometimes I tweak them a bit, given the additional space. And sometimes I re-order them.
I’ve found it personally informative to revisit the previous week of thinking out loud in public. Also, I think knowing you’ll revisit what you say pulls in the reins a bit, in a good way, on what you do say.
▰ Either the electric car near me is in the process of dying, or the sound it normally makes when backing up has been replaced with a low fidelity MP3 titled “the sound of a dying electric car”
▰ Did this poll:
▰ I own thousands upon thousands of CDs, upward of 8,000, maybe more, having purchased my first discs (Remain in Light, Discipline, Violent Femmes, Thursday Afternoon) in 1985/86. Not one has ever been put in my CD player and failed to play. (Per conversation with Bruce Levenstein and Lee Rosevere)
▰ From Alex Ross’ piece in the October 31, 2022, issue of The New Yorker on the renovated home of the New York Philharmonic.
▰ My laptop is Maas Biolabs. My iPad is The Peripheral. My phone is Count Zero. I need a fourth device name, fellow William Gibson readers. (Right now Eastern Seaboard Fission Authority is in the lead.)
▰ Speaking of which, William Gibson is now on Mastodon: mastodon.social/@greatdismal.
▰ Tired enough when I woke up that I sat looking at the new weather app in macOS, pondering what the “53” meant in the circle that identified my location: an arcane municipal code, a proprietary geographic designation, a meteorological identifier? No, the temperature.
▰ My three tweets immediately after the earthquake this morning:
1: This is for real.
2: Holy crud, that was intense.
3: Oh, and this is, along with JFK and, of course, the first Star Wars movie, one of my favorite John Williams scores:
▰ Apparently that 5.1-magnitude earthquake in California this morning was a foreshock. Mike Davis has died.
▰ I’m still new to reading modern British crime novels. My Kindle kept pointing out stuff readers had highlighted, and I couldn’t sort out what was special about those particular sentences. Then I realized what was going on. The readers had marked clues as the book progressed.
I should get some friends to all read the same mystery novel and we could all underline the same passages that have nothing in particular to do with the plot, totally throwing off subsequent readers.
I also recognize that this is, to a degree, the plot of Heathers.
▰ Important life update: I have stopped having 8 browser tabs open with different Gmail accounts and now use the Mail app on my Mac.
▰ The weirdest thing about this Matthew Sweet — whom I love — cover of Kate Bush’s “Wuthering Heights” is it makes me want to hear a Richard Thompson version, and I don’t even like Richard Thompson’s voice.
▰ Well, one good thing about that, uh, generous “humanity, whom I love” comment is it got this Miles Davis favorite stuck in my head:
(Teo Macero, whom I love)