I do this manually each Saturday, usually in the morning over coffee: collating most of the little comments I’ve made on social media (as well as related notes), which I think of as my public scratch pad, during the preceding week. These days that mostly means @[email protected] (on Mastodon). Sometimes the material pops up earlier or in expanded form.
▰ Current sounds, Tuesday, March 21, 2023, 2:51pm: rain, wind, someone talking loudly outside, cars passing, car doors slamming shut — no birds, too loud for (most) planes, no fog horns
▰ I do not think I’ll be going for a walk today. This rain is out of control.
▰ So. Many. Sirens.
▰ Concentration level: two different simultaneous brown noise sources
▰ Disappointed that Google’s Bard AI chatbot doesn’t only answer in iambic pentameter
▰ Just sorted out that Apple’s Reminders app on a Mac can have multiple lists open in separate windows. You just have to double click on the given list. This app is so much more powerful than it has any interest in letting people know.
▰ If I remember my foundational Colossus: The Forbin Project and Person of Interest education, then Bard and ChatGPT will either go to war with each other or merge into an unrecognizable force in the next 24 hours
▰ An alert I don’t think I have ever received before: “Ferry services have been suspended”
▰ There’s something unintentionally chilling about this persistent system alert on ChatGPT: “History is temporarily unavailable.”
▰ Me: I’ve bought enough ebooks to last me until the heat death of the universe. Time to hit pause.
Me soon after: Oh, cool, there’s a new, 10-book StoryBundle set (temporarily at storybundle.com) of Lavie Tidhar’s “World SF” recommendations for two bucks a pop. (Authors include Mário Coelho, Silvia Moreno-Garcia, Anya Ow, Francesca T Barbini and Francesco Verso, Nir Yaniv, Shingai Njeri Kagunda, Premee Mohamed, Eugen Bacon and Milton Davis, Aliette de Bodard, and Tidhar.)
▰ While typing out that this week’s Disquiet Junto project is the 586th, I came to recognize that means the 600th one is coming up. That will be 600 weekly music composition prompts since January 2012 — easily 15,000 individual pieces of music produced by hundreds of musicians around the planet. I kinda find it hard to fathom.