I do this manually at the end of each week: collating (and sometimes lightly editing) most of the recent little comments I’ve made on social media, which I think of as my public scratch pad. Some end up on Disquiet.com earlier, sometimes in expanded form. These days I mostly hang out on Mastodon (at post.lurk.org/@disquiet), and I’m also trying out a few others. I take weekends and evenings off social media.
▰ It’s not lost on me that a leading metaphor for generative music, of tending a garden, can also apply to the process of dealing with one’s sizable library of digital audio files. Right now I’m deep in the latter weeds, having switched from iTunes Match to a fairly complex implementation of Plex.
▰ Drizzly day means I’m listing to Oscar Peterson while I type. (My keyboard can’t keep up with his.)
▰ Kind of amazing this far into the existence of the MP3 (etc.) that the simple act of associating a cover image with an album can take countless rounds of metadata fiddling for the system to actually recognize it
▰ Eddie Rabbitt: “I love a rainy night.”
Me: “I kinda like the idea but I still have hurricane PTSD after four years of living in New Orleans, and following the long drought here in San Francisco, I’m kinda not used to the noise and in the end I get very little sleep. So, I’m ambivalent at best.”
▰ My YouTube history this week has a consistent color scheme. Half of it is Yule log and the other half is Icelandic volcano.
▰ 1983: cutting art out of magazines to serve as cassette tape J-cards
2023: cropping JPG files into squares to serve as “covers” for collections of music files
▰ According to the liner notes, some audiobooks are “read,” while others are “performed.” Sometimes this is a meaningful distinction.
▰ Cutting onions and listening to Beastie Boys instrumentals
▰ Current jam: The slow, unsteady beat of a crockpot heating beans in an otherwise silent home