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 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.
▰ Through an earbud, an incoming message is read to me mechanically via text-to-speech (TTS). The message concludes with the emoji TY, short for thank you. I know this because I hear “tie” at the end of the sentence. Then I wonder if in the future people will say “tie” aloud when they mean thank you. Perhaps some already do.
▰ Occasionally these various speech-to-text (STT) voice recording apps I use for note-taking will insert descriptions of the sounds they can’t transcribe. Today I got “(snow crunching)” which I’ve never gotten before, and I can’t help but wonder if it gave this San Francisco that interpretation because I’m (briefly) in New York.
▰ Huh, so if my phone is reading a text message to me, I can say “Stop,” and not only does the reading stop, it initially does a quick little fade-out. I will make much use of this new superpower. (Interesting detail: If I say “Stop” while the message is being read, my “Stop” isn’t itself interpreted by my phone as a voice-to-text message.)
▰ It’s funny. San Francisco certainly doesn’t have more traffic noise than Manhattan, but since it’s not 10ºF here, I can open the windows, and thus there are way more sirens than I heard for the past week. Good to be home, either way.
▰ “Blue Liz,” “Petrified Forest,” “Cosmic Cobalt” — these are some of the many colors of crayons that Disquiet Junto participants are exploring for their sonic content in this week’s project. … Oh, and “Permanent Geranium Lake” — an old-school banger, as crayon color names go
▰ New York was great. It’s great to be home. These things are mutually compatible.
The apparent bend in the photo — noticeable particularly if you look at the Cliff House, the large building on the right — is because I angled the camera upward, so as to limit the presence of the volleyball activity, and instead capture more of the sky.
▰ Kinda entranced by the way my various speech-to-text tools describe stray noises, most recently: “(pages rustling)”
▰ Didn’t finish reading anything this week, but made solid progress on, among other books, Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children and Adrian Tchaikovsky’s Children of Ruin, the coincidence of the titles (along with fact that both jump around in time while considering the subject of cleaved societies) having just occurred to me.