I wandered by the Internet Archive today, because when you live in the Richmond District of San Francisco, the Internet Archive isn’t just a browser tab. It’s a giant physical building (a former church built 101 years ago, back in 1923) that you walk by on your way to get some walnuts from the farmers market, and some dim sum for lunch — and to return the graphic novel that the library has been, understandably, nagging you about. Anyhow, there’s an art exhibit currently in the main hall at the Archive, so the side door happens to be open, and you head on in, and there, along with the exhibit, are stacks and stacks of servers, each of them occasionally evidencing a pinging blue light when data is being accessed, and collectively they emit the hum of information in action.
I do this manually at the end of each week: collating (and sometimes lightly editing) most of the recent little comments I’ve made on social media, which I think of as my public scratch pad. Some end up on Disquiet.com earlier, sometimes in expanded form. These days I mostly hang out on Mastodon (at post.lurk.org/@disquiet), and I’m also trying out a few others. I take weekends and evenings off social media.
▰ Happiness is when internet friends send you the sounds of siren tests from where they live, halfway around the world
▰ You’re looking at the weather on your laptop and seeing clear skies currently and ahead, and while you scroll further through the day-to-come, you start to hear this weird sound that you can’t identify because while it’s clearly rain your brain has just been told that it’s not raining
▰ I left New Orleans 21 years ago this summer, and judging by my reaction to the ongoing storm, it’s safe to say that I still have hurricane PTSD. I also miss New Orleans. These things aren’t mutually exclusive.
▰ I’ve tried a paid search engine. An interesting aspect of my behavior I observed: since I was aware of a limit on the number of searches, I didn’t uniformly search blindly, but often opted to go to instead to topic/service-specific websites (Discogs, ModularGrid, Wikipedia, NY Times, YouTube).
It’s not a bad habit to be in in the first place, though you end up locking yourself into specific pools of responses. I’m not stoked about paid search, which makes me think of the Miasma of Neal Stephenson’s The Fall; or, Dodge in Hell, and the need for paid filters to maintain a grip on reality.
I’m also not clear how beneficial paid search is for privacy, since so much of the web is overrun with tracking in the first place. Anyhow, been interesting to try it out.
▰ Mojo Nixon is everywhere Mojo Nixon is everything Mojo Nixon is everybody Mojo Nixon is still the king
▰ Friday morning status report
▰ Current guitar practice status (shoe for scale). This is me after practicing various C major scale modes and what I think are the pentatonics thereof, but I could be totally mistaken.
▰ I finished reading one novel this week, my fifth of the year: my first Nick Harkaway novel, Titanium Noir. I figured out much of the mystery as it unfolded, including the final reveal — excepting one particular whopper that impressed me. Figuring out such a mystery is to the writer’s credit, because it means the answers aren’t random. (I’m reading two long-ish ones currently — nearly 500 and 600 pages, respectively — so I doubt I’ll finish either in the coming week, but we’ll see.)
▰ I finished reading five graphic novels this week, my favorite being Social Fiction, a collection of three novellas from the 1970s by Chantal Montellier, whom I’ve never read much by before, having not read much Heavy Metal back in the day and, of course, being a monolingual American. I absolutely loved this collection of bleak dystopian stories. Also finished Night Fever: The “fever” in the title may be a fever dream, as it’s unclear what’s real and what isn’t in this midlife-crisis noir from the excellent team of writer Ed Brubaker and illustrator Sean Phillips. And I read three more volume of the manga called The Fable by Katsuhisa Minami. In volume 8, the antihero (increasingly simply the hero) wanders into the woods. Violence and philosophy ensue, and the civilized world gets even less civilized. In volume 9, the antihero emerges from his forest bath to walk right into a revealing flashback, and there’s a some solid action, even if the story gets a bit icky. And, whew, a lot happens in volume 10, including a heap of internecine backstory, more coincidences than you can throw a tankobon at, and some intense blackmailing. Whew, indeed.
▰ Just a note that between Bluesky, Threads, Mastodon, and Facebook, only Threads and Mastodon are good at long, ongoing threads. Bluesky loses track of where you left off, and Facebook doesn’t seem remotely concerned with keeping track of where you are. I’m noting this in relation to my ongoing threads of books I’ve read. I don’t keep track on Instagram, though I know #bookstagram is a thing. I’d likely only track books about music on Instagram, and even then: Instagram doesn’t really have threads, though I suppose you could use Stories to such an end.
I mention these three following posts on occasion when the topic of blogging comes up, and I sometimes group them together, but only today did it occur to me — when responding via email to two different people inquiring about their newly started blogs on sound and music — that despite this blog, Disquiet.com, having been around since late 1996, it’s never actually had a tag specifically for blogging. So, now it does.
I’ve written more about blogging than just these (as of today) three* posts, but these are the key items for the time being. I may add some older posts to the #blogging tag here over time, and I also may do some occasional blogging-specific writing. We’ll see. The key thing is that if you appreciate that blogging is about working out ideas in public, then there’s no evidence of that in action quite like recognizing topic clusters after the fact in your own writing — which is to say, in your own thinking.
It's officially moved to Buttondown (from TinyLetter)
/ By Marc Weidenbaum
This note — complete with a few minor repetitions I might have dealt with had I had more time — was included in today’s issue of the weekly Disquiet Junto project announcement email list:
As you should by now know, the email newsletter for Disquiet Junto project announcements has migrated from one service provider to another — from TinyLetter.com, which is closing down on February 29, 2024, to Buttondown, about which you can learn more at buttondown.email.
One nice thing about Buttondown is that I can use my own URL, so the home for the newsletter is now juntoletter.disquiet.com, which means that down the road, should I choose to change service providers again, the newsletter itself can retain its URL.
Another nice thing about Buttondown is that I can schedule posts to send automatically, meaning that much as this week’s project popped up at disquiet.com/0632 while I was sleeping, thanks to my blog’s powers of automation (it’s on WordPress), so too can I set this email to go out while I’m asleep. I sleep fairly soundly, and now I’ll sleep even more soundly, knowing that I have one fewer chores come morning. I’ve set this one to go out at 6:32am Pacific. We’ll know tomorrow how that has worked out.
A third nice thing about Buttondown is that I have less of a limit on the number of emails I can send out. So, while I promise not to abuse such newfound freedom, I look forward to occasionally sending notes of encouragement or with additional information off the weekly Thursday cycle. This is great.
Nice things, however, are generally balanced by downsides. Which is to say, Buttondown is not free. It’s not terribly expensive, when thought of at an annual rate, but it does cost, and will cost more as the subscriber list continues to grow. I may at some point add a paid option to this list, simply as a way for folks to chip in on the infrastructure costs that support the Junto — and perhaps pay for additional such infrastructure, such as a dedicated web presence, down the road. (In the meanwhile, if supporting the Junto in such a manner appeals to you, you could in the meanwhile subscribe to my This Week in Sound email letter. I’m remembering now that I dislike talking about money, so why don’t I stop there?)
And that covers it. I don’t think I mentioned that there was an academic article about the Disquiet Junto in the Cambridge University Press journal Organised Sound, and you can read it online. If you have any thoughts, please let me know.
Oh, and we’ve had a new slew of subscribers, so if you have any questions or thoughts, just shoot me an email.
And that really covers it. I hope this email goes out smoothly, and your year is going smoothly, as well. And thanks, as always, for your generosity with your time, creativity, and curiosity. The project instructions appear below.
Best from a chilly — by local standards — San Francisco,
