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.
▰ I remember when there were only two readily available recordings of Brumel’s “Earthquake” Mass (from around the first decade of 1500). I’ve got some catching up to do.
▰ I’m very happy that Beat (Adrian Belew, Danny Carey, Tony Levin, Steve Vai) continue to tour, playing the fantastic 1980s King Crimson repertoire, with Carey filling Bill Bruford’s shoes and Vai filling Robert Fripp’s. What I’m hoping for is that they start writing new music together.
▰ These endless automated spam calls for fake loans and other phishy hijinks just can’t be sustainable. The prevalence must be impacting how people even use their phones, how (not) responsive people are to inbound calls in general. It’s kind of bizarre robocalls can legally persist like this.
▰ Q: The 750th Disquiet Junto project happens in a couple weeks. You gonna run out of project ideas?
A: I drove to the Marin Headlands this weekend and got two ideas out the trip before I even arrived at my destination, and a project proposal was waiting for me in my email from a regular participant.
▰ A friend DMd me the transcription of a voice message from an elder relative, whose accented English was impenetrable (i.e., ignored) by the automated voice-to-text tool. I thought immediately of Malka Older talking about writing for people whose names are underlined in Microsoft Word.
▰ Just to repeat: We live in the golden age of vaporware.
▰ I would have recorded and shared the dulcet sizzle of my dolsot bibimbap lunch, but the K-pop* playing on the restaurant stereo would have earned me a takedown notice.
I did get a good pun out of it. I also learned a new-to-me word: “nurungji,” or “scorched rice,” the flavor of the sucking candy that came with my bill.
*IIIBOI, Ash Island, Big Naughty
▰ OK, that’s a neat trick. In Threads I pasted in a long post, and the text was auto-split into suggested multiple posts of the correct length.
▰ I just got a whopper of a phishing expedition: a pleasant email, from someone I know, containing a document that looked totally for real, with the logo and even a watermark for the individual’s organization. In the document was an “Access Document” link for additional information, and the link URL looked initially like that of the organization, except of course it went on and on with hyphenated words, and was a total fake. If you click on it, you have to do a “security check” (ironic, yes — that’s the essence of Erving Goffman’s “cooling the mark out”), and then you are taken to what looks exactly like a Google log-in page, except if you look at the URL it is a truly bizarre concoction that has nothing to do with the organization or with Google, but the URL could easily be overlooked, especially at this stage of the process. Short version: be careful out there.
▰ People need to reread Fahrenheit 451. In popular memory it’s all about censorship and book-burning, but what fills the void of the destroyed books — the personalized immersive audio-visual storytelling — is even worse.
▰ My browser tabs have run amok this week, and are starting to resemble a Paul Smith textile design.
▰ The only thing not in flux is … oh, yeah, everything is in flux.
