Category: field notes

News, essays, reviews, surveillance

Scratch Pad: Kravitz, Jang, Boox

/ 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 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.

Another light week. Been busy.

▰ Slightly distracted during the How to Rob a Bank trailer because I became convinced that the Zoë Kravitz character’s apartment is the same one a different Kravitz character lived in in the Soderbergh movie Kimi. (Different windows, as it turns out.)

▰ The great Michael Jang has my aesthetic number. Which is to say, that’s not my actual number up there, but this fine slice of Clement Street made my week.

▰ I don’t think I’ve had freshly ground matcha before. Very tasty, and the green is hyperreal. Welcome to the neighborhood, Constance Tea.

▰ I’d like the e-ink Boox Go 7 to get popular enough that someone makes a slim keyboard case for it. I upgraded to it from my Kindle Paperwhite. The tablet/reader hybrid works well with Obsidian, and since the last page you look at remains (in most cases, though not all) as the sleep screen, the device has quickly become (as had been my test-case intent/hope) a small project white board (slash to-do list).

▰ I finished reading two manga tankobon (aka paperbacks) this week: Mohiro Kitoh’s Bokurano Ours volume one (2003), which I read some of in the past but never finished, and Time Killers (2000), the standalone collection of one-shots (aka short stories) by Kato Kazue (she’s best known for the long-running, and ongoing, Blue Exorcist).

Underwater Gamer ASMR

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

Having listened at length to — though by no means for the full extent of — the 10 hours of underwater ambience extracted from the video game Subnautica 2, I can state that there is not a lot of variety, at least not of the sonic sort. I also jumped around the timeline, and perhaps like the non-digital ocean itself, the gargantuan gurgling immersive space of it is pretty consistent: low rumble, the vibration of passing bodies, plus odd little sounds, perhaps vocalizations, that pop up. The video does vary its visual setting, tracking presumably the course of the day, though there may be more to the sequence than that, since the shifts between light and dark can be quite stark and sudden. All of which is a reminder that gamer ASMR videos like this are as much video as audio, and it’s the combination that draws many viewers (though I was just the 30th or so here, as this one is quite new) and likes (3 as of this post). Another reminder: popularity in one medium doesn’t immediately translate to another. This video with 37 views, as of this writing, is from a brand new game that sold two million copies within the first half day of its release, the middle of last month.