This website, now 29 years of age, gets so frequently barraged by bots that I can’t speak to the veracity or meaningfulness of its traffic data. However, if there is any truth to be discerned from the data, then the following 10 posts were, best I can tell, the most viewed new ones in 2025. On the one hand, I could wait a few more days, until the formal end of this year on Wednesday, to ascertain the exact full list. On the other hand, by posting these now, I’ll end up just buttressing their collective standing. I don’t look at traffic data much at all (this was the second time this year), because I’m not aiming to “optimize a content strategy,” but it was intriguing to see what has garnered particular attention.
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 — and 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.
Right now, though, I’m on a more extended social media (and adjacent) break, through the start of January 2026. (This is my next to last weekend before I get back on that horse.) Which raises the question: when I’m on such a hiatus, what constitutes this site’s Scratch Pad, since this Saturday habit is, by definition, a collation of stuff I posted to social media throughout the given previous week? Apparently it’s random notes I make to myself that I would have posted online, plus bits I’ve sent to friends via email and other means. Just because I’ve stopped posting doesn’t mean my brain has stopped making posts. Anyhow, here’s this past week’s roundup:
▰ As the year was coming to a close, I cleared out my RSS reader, setting back to zero thousands of unread posts that had accumulated. I didn’t erase the ones I marked to read later.
▰ The substation near our home is still not functioning, so there are tons of temporary generators a few blocks away, and they run on diesel. This means that my home computer is currently diesel-powered. Which I kinda like the idea of.
▰ I’ve been posting a lot of short field recordings at freesound.org/people/disquiet. Another participant there expressed concern to me that I was applying geolocation data to what was, in fact, indoor audio. I feel there is some meaning encoded in whether a bathroom fan is recorded in, say, the Mission in San Francisco or Ginza in Tokyo, but I didn’t want to argue the point, so I removed the data — at least for now.
▰ Another year in which Criterion celebrates room tone … by playing music over the room tone.
▰ Been playing a lot of board games (notably Botany) and card games (e.g., Compile, A Gentle Rain, Big Sur, Point City, Exploding Kittens) over the holiday break. I need to understand what it means to have several games with similar underlying mechanics, like the very fun Point City and Big Sur (and I’m considering getting Air, Land & Sea, which reportedly is a strong precursor to the truly excellent Compile). I imagine it’s a lot like with book genres: I only need to read one zombie novel a year, and one high fantasy novel every few years, and one “literary novel featuring overeducated people falling out of love” as infrequently as possible, but I can mainline certain realms of science fiction, and manage reams of spy novels and experimental fiction.
▰ I have a feeling that Jinwoo Park’s Oxford Soju Club — a flashback-rich, cross-cultural spy thriller, with a hefty serving of Korean recipes — is the last novel, my 27th, I will finish reading in 2025. Late December is deep family time, leaving limited opportunity for reading. Also, the books I’m in the midst of are pretty lengthy. We’ll see.
The above screenshot is from the movie Relay, a recent thriller starring Riz Ahmed reminiscent of Hitchcock and mid-period Mamet. I may write more about the movie later, but at the moment what I’m wondering about is what a “stunt cello” is, and how it’s different from the non-stunt cello also listed here. There is a sequence with a string ensemble, so maybe “stunt cello” refers to the person who plays that cello on-screen? I dunno.
This is the email that went out, along with the latest project instructions, on Christmas Eve to email list subscribers:
Dear Members of the Disquiet Junto,
Next Thursday is the first day of 2026, which means that this week’s project is the last one of 2025. If you’ve been involved in the Junto — or followed it — for some time, you likely know what this week’s and next week’s projects are going to entail, since we do the “diary project” at the end of every year, and the “ice project” at the start of every year.
We just finished up the 729th consecutive weekly Disquiet Junto project, and it went great. I had a sense that, as this year came to a close, a “shared sample” project would be a particularly welcome opportunity for people, the idea of everyone involved, wherever in the world, using the same source audio to make something new, something personal. To listen back (at llllllll.co and soundcloud.com) to the work of the four dozen or so musicians who participated is a downright kaleidoscopic experience, hearing that 100-year-old recording broken up and reconfigured to so many different creative ends. We do shared sample projects on occasion in the Junto, and I have a feeling that this year’s may be the start of another annual community tradition.
If you’re reading this, I can’t thank you enough for your contribution to the Junto, whether you’re just following along, or participating on occasion, or inviting others to join in, or spreading the word. The Disquiet Junto turns 14 years old next Thursday, January 1, 2026, and I can’t wait to hear what we all do together in the coming year. The 750th consecutive Disquiet Junto project is just 20 weeks away, and the 15th anniversary of the Junto is a year away. That 15th anniversary will coincide, perchance, with the 300th anniversary of the founding, by Benjamin Franklin, of the original Junto way back in 1727. So, lots of creative resources and inspiration await.
And that covers it. Thanks, as always, for your generosity with your time, creativity, and curiosity. I know the holidays can be hard for some folks, and if the Junto community can take the edge off, that’s great. Whatever your engagement in the Junto, please never feel any pressure to participate, to post, or to comment. The whole point of it being weekly is that it’s there, dependably, when you have both the time and the interest.
The Assignment: Create a sonic diary of the past year with a dozen (or more) super-brief segments.
/ 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.
Disquiet Junto Project 0730: Calendar Advent The Assignment: Create a sonic diary of the past year with a dozen (or more) super-brief segments.
As has become the tradition at the end of each calendar year, this week’s Junto project is a sound journal: a selective audio history of your past 12 months.
Step 1: You will select a different audio element to represent each of the past 12 months of 2025 — or you might opt for even more elements, choosing a segment for each week, or each day, for example. These audio elements will most likely be of music that you have yourself composed and recorded, but they might also consist of phone messages, field recordings, or other source material. These items should be somehow personal in nature, suitable to the autobiographical intention of the project; they should be of your own making, your own devising, and not drawn from third-party sources.
Step 2: You will then select one segment from each of these (most likely) dozen audio elements. If you’re doing a dozen items, one for each month, then five-second segments are recommended, for a total of one minute. Ultimately, though, the length of the segments and of the overall finished track are up to you.
Step 3: Then you will stitch these segments together, equally weighted, in chronological order to form one single track. There should be no overlap or gap between segments; they should simply proceed from one to the next.
Step 4: In the notes field accompanying the track, identify each of the audio segments.
Tasks Upon Completion:
Label: Include “disquiet0730” (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.
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 730th weekly Disquiet Junto project, Calendar Advent — The Assignment: Create a sonic diary of the past year with a dozen (or more) super-brief segments — at https://disquiet.com/0730/.
