Author: Marc Weidenbaum

Scratch Pad: Ho, Slip, Club

From the past (offline) week

/ By 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.

Right now, though, I’m on a more extended break, through the start of January 2026. Which raises the question: If I’m on a social media (and adjacent) hiatus, what constitutes this site’s Scratch Pad, since it is by definition a collation of stuff I posted to social media throughout the given previous week. Apparently it’s random notes I made to myself that I would have posted online. Just because I’ve stopped posting doesn’t mean my brain has stopped making posts

▰ I just got to the point in Mick Herron’s latest Slow Horses novel, Clown Town, where Roddy Ho appears to be singing the theme song to the TV show (“losers and boozers”), and Lech, overhearing him, says, “Working on your theme song?” Fan service at its finest. I also understand from an interview I saw with the actor who plays Ho, Christopher Chung, that he is quite the vocalist. Nice touch setting him up to sing when this eventually becomes an episode.

▰ I’ve realized I’ve gotten into this habit of listening to the second track of an album first, because so many albums have the first track as a sort of intro thing, and I want to drop right into the thick of it. I eventually do hear the first track, because I tend to listen on loop, so eventually it comes back around to the first track — but often, oddly, it’s the last track I’ll hear.

▰ My lizard brain recognized that parts of the melodies of Simon & Garfunkel’s “The 59th Street Bridge Song (Feelin’ Groovy)” (1966) and the theme song to the TV show H.R. Pufnstuf (1969) are quite similar, and my current earworm is a mashup thereof.

▰ I’ve watched several review videos of these screen protectors for iPads that give it a paper-like quality. And the reviewers frequently mention how the material “sounds like paper,” as per this screenshot.

▰ There is a newsletter (Substack) from Liz Harris (aka Grouper). (Thanks, Pablo Flouret!)

▰ Something I typed yielded both “breaking“ and “healing” as options. That is verging on literary quantum superposition. Schrödinger’s dictionary.

▰ Tired: Last Night a DJ Saved My Life

Wired: This Morning Backblaze Saved My MP3 Hard Drive

▰ And speaking of social media, there is an odd void in streaming music. One of the best parts of the long defunct rdio, which lasted from my birthday in 2020 until the end of 2015, was how you could track what friends were listening to. Soundcloud, likewise, early on had a “groups” function, which the service dispensed with. There’s a new service, called record.club, which describes itself as “a social music network.” The founders seem pretty self-aware, per the FAQ: “The obvious comparison is Goodreads and Letterboxd (or for that matter, Rate Your Music).” (There’s also a This Is My Jam vibe, etc., etc.) And: “Sure, that sounds a bit vague—but that’s the point.” I’m on at record.club/disquiet. I may post some additional thoughts as I explore it. I’m somewhat list-averse, so this may not be for me, but we’ll see.

▰ According to the November 20 New York Times Mini Crossword, “skip” is a colloquial noun for a “Song on an album that you always avoid.” I didn’t know this was in common usage.

Digital Cozy

At the year's end

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

Just some thoughts about this end-of-year semi-retreat I take from digital life:

Life is inherently digital these days, so it’s not like I’ve turned off my computers, unplugged the television, or — let alone and — put my phone in a safe. I make no claims to using my devices significantly less often. In fact, just this week I upgraded my second generation iPad Pro to this year’s model, aiming to take advantage of the laptop-like benefits of iPadOS 26, aka Tahoe.

I’m not really that concerned about the extent to which I use personal technology. I already read a lot of books. I already go for walks. I go to concerts and spend time at museums. I may not spend ten minutes with a single piece of art, but I can easily do five. I have meals with friends. I spend much of my non-work hours with family. In other words, the main break that I take at the end of the year is that of digital connection to other people. Even then, I’m still checking email. I still work. I’m vaguely responding to DMs, though because I turned off social media I find many go missing for extended periods of time.

The distinction here is what I think of as “formal social media,” or “immediate social media” — by which, for my purposes, I mean the likes of Bluesky, Mastodon, Facebook, Instagram, and Threads. These are technological platforms in which much of the response cycle is short and rapid. For good measure, I also fold into this category of social media a solid number of the email lists, Discords, and BBSs (most founded on Discourse) I’m part of. I’m not a purist about just about anything, including this segment of digital activity. There are a couple book discussion groups I participate in, between email and Discord, that I won’t be turning a blind eye to, simply because I want to continue those asynchronous conversations.

What I am turning down, if not off, is the number of conversations — especially the explicitly short-term ones inherent in social media — that I participate in. I’ll almost certainly re-up come January. For now, the respite is, first and foremost, cozy. Digital cozy.

Disquiet Junto Project 0725: Rack It

The Assignment: Change the "focus" of a track as it plays.

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

Each Thursday in the Disquiet Junto music community, a new compositional challenge is set before the group’s members, who then have five days to record and upload a track in response to the project instructions.

Membership in the Junto is open: just join and participate. (A SoundCloud account is helpful but not required.) There’s no pressure to do every project. The Junto is weekly so that you know it’s there, every Thursday through Monday, when your time and interest align.

Tracks are added to the SoundCloud playlist for the duration of the project. Additional (non-SoundCloud) tracks also generally appear in the lllllll.co discussion thread.

Disquiet Junto Project 0725: Rack It
The Assignment: Change the “focus” of a track as it plays.

Step 1: There is a concept in photography and filmmaking called “rack focus,” which can be understood as the process of altering depth of field so as to draw attention to one or another element.

Step 2: Record a track in which you apply the concept of “rack focus” to sound.

Approach: You might, for example, take a preexisting track for which you already have the various layers separated, and then at any given moment, put all but one through a low-pass filter. That’s just a suggestion.

Tasks Upon Completion:

Label: Include “disquiet0725” (no spaces/quotes) in the name of your track.

Upload: A person participating in the Disquiet Junto should post only one track per weekly project (SoundCloud account preferred but not required). If on occasion you feel inspired to post more than one track (whether to a single account or across multiple accounts), you should clarify which is the “main” rendition for consideration by fellow members and (if on SoundCloud) for inclusion in the SoundCloud playlist.

Share: Post your track and a description/explanation at https://llllllll.co/t/disquiet-junto-project-0725-rack-it/

Discuss: Listen to and comment on the other tracks.

Additional Details:

Length: The length is up to you. 

Deadline: Monday, November 24, 2025, 11:59pm (that is: just before midnight) wherever you are.

About: https://disquiet.com/junto/

Newsletter: https://juntoletter.disquiet.com/

License: It’s preferred (but not required) to set your track as downloadable and allowing for attributed remixing (i.e., an attribution Creative Commons license).

Please Include When Posting Your Track:

More on the 725th weekly Disquiet Junto project, Rack It — The Assignment: Change the “focus” of a track as it plays — at https://disquiet.com/0725/.

Plex … and Then Again

Home audio hassles

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

Inevitably, right after I decided to mention here how I like Plex as a platform for a personal jukebox, I went and had problems with Plex. It’s a basic fact that these systems are far from perfect, and while they’re designed for consumers, they require a certain amount of not only technical orientation but also patience — and perhaps the sort of tinkerer’s mindset, which is to say that the tinkering is a feature, rather than a bug.

What happened was I updated my Mac mini to macOS Tahoe 26, and suddenly the way I used to be able to screen share to it from my MacBook Pro (also running Tahoe) didn’t work seamlessly anymore.

Why do I need screen sharing? Because the whole point of having the Mac mini server is that it’s “headless”: it just sits on/in my living room console with my speakers and amplifier and turntable and so forth, and though while it’s wired into all that, it’s also, of course, networked (locally and when I’m out and about). But for some reason, the networking suddenly doesn’t work the way it used to.

I was able to find a vnc:// URL I can use to access the mini, and now everything seems to work fine, but the hassle does make the whole system feel sort of fragile. Which didn’t keep me from ordering a larger hard drive. We’ll see how this goes.

And then again, of course, nothing’s quite as fragile as an LP record that I watch slide across the floor after I accidentally drop it — not that I’ve done that since my teens.

Virtual Synthesis

From Nvra

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

A gorgeous, slow-moving, haunting stretch of virtual synthesis, courtesy of the musician who goes by Nvra. There’s a growing category of online footage of tracks documented underway in real time using the VCV Rack software platform. VCV is a software emulator of modular synthesizers, meaning one can, affordably, patch together multiple instances of modules that, in the real/physical world, would add up to a pretty penny. Instead, there’s a pretty visualization of what’s happening. The developer of VCV has commented that despite it being an audio production tool, the graphics challenge is in some ways the greater one, due to the sheer amount of elements that might be shown at a given time. As the tool has matured, it’s provided more options to stylize the way the modules appear, and that has, no doubt, helped encourage people to post videos of their work online, and in public. Nvra’s track, titled simply “Collider,” is a lush, carefully paced series of swells, some tonal, some seemingly vocal, and then occasionally highlighted with little sonic glints and melodic snippets.