I do this manually at the end of each week: collating recent comments I’ve made on social media, which I think of as my public scratch pad. I find knowing I’ll revisit my posts to be a positive and mellowing influence on my social media activity. I mostly hang out on Mastodon (at post.lurk.org/@disquiet), and I’m also trying out a few others. And I generally take weekends off social media.
▰ Does the conductor perspiring while the orchestra plays Brahms count as Sweatin’ to the Oldies?
▰ One odd downside to being off social media from Friday night to Monday morning is may you receive Instagram alerts about stories you’ve been mentioned in that have since disappeared, as have stories those stories might have responded to. It’s like showing up to a party after it ended, but I’m happy for my low-digital weekends.
▰ Whew, a month and a couple days from the 28th anniversary of Disquiet.com. Getting that URL and getting the site going was one of the best decisions I ever made. I resisted the word “blog” for a long time, but I’ve long since embraced it.
▰ A British novel introduced me to the term “crosspatch,” apparently a derogatory word for a “bad-tempered person” (versus, I suppose, a laudatory term for a bad-tempered person?). Now I wanna hear bad-tempered synth patches. And I realize as I type this that “tempered” also has a musical meaning. And there is a synth company called Crosspatch, but I don’t think the name choice had anything to do with the slang term. They make one Eurorack module, called the Triggerpad, which serves as an interface for grids, such as the Launchpad.
Ah, as the Further Records account (on Bluesky) subsequently pointed out to me, “curmudgeon” arguably counts as a laudatory term for a bad-tempered person.
▰ Best autocorrect yet: while I was typing the word “are” my laptop decided to unfold those three letters into “aesthetically pleasing.” We’re going to wake up one morning and computers will simply have gone insane and there will be no walking it back.
▰ Remarkable how much better a laptop seems to run when you simply clean the grime off its screen
▰ It’s funny to think I might want my streaming music service to learn from my Shazam usage, like I can’t be interested in the identity of a song yet never ever want to hear it or anything like it again
▰ This elevator would make an even better synthesizer sequencer:
▰ 1999: Begin to download new email in the morning, and by the time it’s all downloaded, there’s more email to download.
2024: Begin to download new app updates on your phone in the morning, and by the time they’re downloaded and installed, there are new app updates.
▰ Let’s get liminal, liminal:
▰ “noise sewer” — Say what you will about the blight that is noise pollution, it sure does reap linguistic rewards. This phrase is from concerns in Kent about the impact of changes at Gatwick, already one of Britain’s busiest airports (telegraph.co.uk).
▰ Finished reading one novel this week, on top of the two I finished last week — and of course, immediately started reading three more. I finished Lawrence Robbins’ The President’s Lawyer, based on a positive mention by Sarah Lyall in the New York Times.