Author: Marc Weidenbaum

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.

▰ Afternoon trio for microwave, idling truck, and passing jet plane

▰ Sort of ironic, last night, having my Kindle fail — a rare occurrence, maybe second time in the years I’ve been using one — at bedtime while I was reading a book about Zen. It was like a test of what I was engaged in reading and thinking about. Could I remain calm in the face of sudden digital adversity?

▰ I’m fairly certain the car’s air conditioner, when on high, temporarily lowers in intensity when I use voice-to-text for an outgoing message or a reply to an alert.

▰ Because my schedule is fairly routine, I often find myself walking into the same big box store at roughly the same time every few weeks, and invariably the Cardigans’ “Lovefool” is playing (perhaps because the in-house playlist also adheres to a strict schedule). I’ve come to think of the song as the theme music when my character makes his occasional appearance on whatever sitcom I keep accidentally wandering into.

▰ The Detectorists theme song, by Johnny Flynn, is my favorite 16th-century song of the 21st century

▰ An excellent San Francisco evening hearing Alexis Madrigal yap with Laurene Markham at Green Apple Books (the one on the other side of the park from where I live) about the former’s new book, what it means to be Oaklandish, the containerization of commerce, the deep research to get that one fact right, disparities between how Detroit and Silicon Valley celebrate their workers, and (as I managed to get a question in) how a nine-year book-writing gestation process unfolds.

▰ Research on creating “audible enclaves” that enable private sound transmissions in public spaces — that is, “localized pockets of sound that are isolated from their surroundings”

▰ I’ve been playing early (roughly mid-1990s) video games, listening for diegetic sounds (that is: environmental, in contrast with music), and I particularly dug the bird song and bells at the start of Chrono Trigger (1995). I love how they’re digitally generated, so they fit right in with the music.

▰ Barbershop trio for snoring dog, electric razor, and passing bus.

▰ As with last week: Ton of reading underway (mostly Cory Doctorow’s Walkaway and an Alan Watts book), didn’t finish reading anything.