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 — and I tag on what books I may have finished reading. Knowing I’ll revisit my social media posts, I’ve found, serves as a positive and mellowing influence on my online 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.
Right now, though, I’m on a more extended social media (and adjacent) break, through the start of January 2026. Which raises the question: when I’m on such a hiatus, what constitutes this site’s Scratch Pad, since this Saturday habit is, by definition, a collation of stuff I posted to social media throughout the given previous week? Apparently it’s random notes I make to myself that I would have posted online, plus bits I’ve sent to friends via email and other means. Just because I’ve stopped posting doesn’t mean my brain has stopped making posts. Anyhow, here’s this past week’s roundup:
▰ This week I started posting brief field recordings, each roughly 30 seconds in length, and writing about them. The series is now titled #30s. It’s funny, and informative in its own way, how this began. I went for a walk, which became an unexpected errand, which led to me hearing something (#30 Retail Phase, the sound of a retailer’s shoplifting alarm system), and recording it, and writing about it, and then doing the same three more times: (#30 Play Misty, the city waking to rain; #30 Block Chain, construction noise; and #30 Internal Monologue, the sound inside the household fridge). One chance alteration of a plan blossomed into an ongoing mini-series of interrelated reflective investigations.
▰ I’ve apparently been on freesound.org for over 20 years.
▰ Pondering trying again at Weekly Beats / “Jamuary,” which kick off in a few weeks
▰ On the Lines BBS (llllllll.co) there’s an annual discussion of the upcoming year’s goals, and I made some gestures in that direction.
▰ I just noticed the little waveforms that appear on my iPhone when I’m on a phone call with someone. There is a waveform at the top of the screen (iPhone 17 Pro), a tiny thing to the right of the “dynamic island,” and it shows different colors, on opposing sides of the waveform, depending on who is speaking.
▰ I spend a lot of time on video conference calls. Recently it’s seemed that people have had less difficulty with audio. I don’t know if the interfaces or the underlying technology are getting better, or we’ve just all been better trained at this point.
▰ A backpack remains a central organizing principal of my life. Getting a new one is a milestone of sorts, and requires some reorientation.
▰ Will there ever be another Don DeLillo novel? When will the next William Gibson book be published?
▰ I finished reading two novels this week: Jon Fosse’s Morning and Evening and Sarah Gailey’s Spread Me, respectively the 25th and 26th of the year (not counting a novel’s worth of books I started and didn’t finish). The strongest aspect of Morning and Evening, to me, is the fluidity with which Fosse paints these liminal existential/theological spaces. It was interesting to have completed it right after What We Can Know, by Ian McEwan (Atonement), because both novels have distinct parts one and two. In What We Can Know, there is a lot of part one before the jump; in Morning and Evening, there is precious little. Meanwhile, the “literary” What We Can Do and the “pulpy” Spread Me both take the future impact of climate change as their starting points, and both are lust-heavy. I’m almost done with Jinwoo Park’s Oxford Soju Club, and deep into several others, Middlemarch, House of Leaves, and Midnight’s Children among them. Yeah, too many at once, again. That’s one new year’s resolution deflated before the new year has even begun.