Scratch Pad: Ballard, Oblique, IMAP

From the past week

At the end of each week, I usually collate a lightly edited collection of 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.

▰ “Rows and rows of disused milk floats / Stand dying in the dairy yard / And a hundred lonely housewives / Clutch empty milk bottles to their hearts”

The Jam’s “Town Called Malice” could be re-titled “Town Called Ballard,” as in JG, and you wouldn’t have to change another word.

▰ The excellent You Are Listening To website got a relaunch/reskin/reboot:

▰ An Oblique Strategies hack. Choose two, and contemplate how they play together and what tension surfaces between them:

phone: “Cut a vital connection”

laptop: “Destroy nothing; Destroy the most important thing”

▰ IMAP is still magic

▰ One of the best things comma I think comma about voice-to-text is overhearing people speaking punctuation out loud comma as if they’re standing at a blackboard in grade school period

Also comma you can easily weed out people who don’t use serial commas period

▰ When I’m back in New York, I always listen for whose music I’ll hear first: Billy Joel’s, Bruce Springsteen’s, or Bon Jovi’s. After a week and a half on Long Island free of all of them, I stepped off the LIRR and into Penn Station, only to be greeted by a subway busker playing “Uptown Girl” on a Melodica.

▰ Been in New York for two weeks now, read less than I have during any equivalent period of the year. Digging into a short novel to dig myself out of the whole. OK, a couple short novels.

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