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. (This marks my last weekend before I get back on that horse.) 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:
▰ The last time I had social media posts to share was mid-November. I’ve gotten deep enough into the annual hiatus to not fully remember. I actually had to look back to confirm when it started, and I’m taking my lack of certainty as a good sign: the hiatus has been successful. I’ve found I’m making fewer than ever cursory notes as the given day goes by. Just have a few this week. I have some other thoughts on the digital break, and I may flesh them out later.
▰ On the second floor of the San Jose Art Museum right now, if you stand in the right place, you can hear two art installations overlap: a recording by Futurefarmers, as part of the Young Bay Mud exhibit, featuring the San Jose State University marching band, and solo female Hmong vocalists, in a work devised by the artist Pao Houa Her. The combination of the pair is (semi?) unintentionally fantastic.
▰ I’ve mentioned the little waveforms on my iPhone that appear when I’m speaking with someone. This is on an iPhone 17 Pro, with the “dynamic island,” running iOS 26. I hadn’t shown previously what they look like: the green is me, and the orange is someone else. This is when we were both speaking at the same time. Note this is a still image, while the waveforms vibrate and grow larger and smaller, depending on the individual speaking.
▰ As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner is one of many books entering the public domain this year. It especially lends itself to the zombie treatment, say As I Lay Undying?
▰ Why doesn’t Audacity have the ability to save a single clip to an audio file?
▰ I finished reading one book this past week, just before the year ended: Jinwoo Park’s cross-cultural thriller Oxford Soju Club, which features North Koreans, South Koreans, and a Korean-American, all fish out of water in Oxford, England. It was the 27th and final novel I read in 2025. I posted the full list earlier this week. I’m now well into Flesh, by David Szalay, and that’ll likely be the first novel I finish reading in 2026.