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.
▰ I recorded some thoughts and transcribed them, and the end of the recording went on until I decided I had nothing else to add, and that silence was later interpreted as the word “Ugh” repeated 47 times, per the resulting speech-to-text transcript.
Today when we say “I recorded some thoughts” we mean we wrote something down or recorded ourselves speaking, and I recognize that at some point that will actually mean “I recorded some thoughts”
▰ Having the late Jóhann Jóhannsson’s Sicario score playing in the background while you work sure can make your home office environment feel a lot more eventful than it actually is
▰ Nothing like the sound of dough being strenuously manipulated in the creation of pupusas
▰ The list is up — that is, Steven Soderbergh’s annual list of what he watched and read the year prior. When I’m in doubt or just need a change of pace, I look at his lists. With the novels, it’s hard not to imagine them as movies he directed.
▰ Guitar class went particularly well, though it may just be because I turned the gain up
▰ Next up in guitar class, I’m focused on “Stay Awake,” likely to be followed closely (or not so closely, depending on how much time this takes) by “Baby Mine.” (All of which has less to do with the recent 100th anniversary of Disney than with an abiding affection for the late Hal Willner.)
▰ One nice thing about the eBow is if you drop it under the couch while playing guitar, its light sure makes it easy to locate
▰ Your generic, AI-generated press release is not reflecting well on your new record album
▰ The feeling when you wonder if a piece of music equipment you sold to someone who turned out to be a musician who, you know, actually releases music may be on a new release from that musician.
Also, the feeling when a newly arrived package with used gear bears the name of a musician you listen to.
▰ Updated my running list on various social media of novels I’ve read this year, which so far includes Alastair Reynolds’ Permafrost (a very solid time travel story) and Adrian Tchaikovsky’s Shards of Earth (sort of “high fantasy in space” about a ragtag crew against monstrous, well-nigh unknowable threat).
▰ Updated my running list on various social media of graphic novels and manga I’ve read this year, which so far includes Junji Ito’s Sensor, the three-volume run of Keanu Reeves’ Brzrkr (which I picked up because I’d read that the next China Miéville novel is a collaboration with Reeves based on Brzrkr), Guy Delisle’s World Record Holders (it was fun to revisit his earlier work, when his style was still developing), Kate Schneider’s Headland (a gorgeous and deeply touching graphic novel about an elderly woman’s decline into dementia — I use that word broadly as the vocabulary isn’t entirely familiar to me — and while it arguably could have been wordless, the words let the writer depict when language decays), and Roaming by cousins Jillian Tamaki and Mariko Tamaki (artists at Marvel and DC should be required by their editors to study how much Jillian Tamaki gets out of some of the characters’ particularly limited features), and the first four volumes of The Fable (a manga by Katsuhisa Minami about a prolific hitman who tries to spend a full year not killing people).