No post on Sunday, due to the blackout that swamped a lot of San Francisco, including the neighborhood where I live. Definitely gives new meaning to this site’s “current activities” tag.
Blackout
New meaning to this tag
Category: field notes
News, essays, reviews, surveillance
Scratch Pad: 30s, Freesound, Fosse
From the past week
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. 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:
▰ This week I started posting brief field recordings, each roughly 30 seconds in length, and writing about them. The series is now titled #30s. It’s funny, and informative in its own way, how this began. I went for a walk, which became an unexpected errand, which led to me hearing something (#30 Retail Phase, the sound of a retailer’s shoplifting alarm system), and recording it, and writing about it, and then doing the same three more times: (#30 Play Misty, the city waking to rain; #30 Block Chain, construction noise; and #30 Internal Monologue, the sound inside the household fridge). One chance alteration of a plan blossomed into an ongoing mini-series of interrelated reflective investigations.
▰ I’ve apparently been on freesound.org for over 20 years.
▰ Pondering trying again at Weekly Beats / “Jamuary,” which kick off in a few weeks
▰ On the Lines BBS (llllllll.co) there’s an annual discussion of the upcoming year’s goals, and I made some gestures in that direction.
▰ I just noticed the little waveforms that appear on my iPhone when I’m on a phone call with someone. There is a waveform at the top of the screen (iPhone 17 Pro), a tiny thing to the right of the “dynamic island,” and it shows different colors, on opposing sides of the waveform, depending on who is speaking.
▰ I spend a lot of time on video conference calls. Recently it’s seemed that people have had less difficulty with audio. I don’t know if the interfaces or the underlying technology are getting better, or we’ve just all been better trained at this point.
▰ A backpack remains a central organizing principal of my life. Getting a new one is a milestone of sorts, and requires some reorientation.
▰ Will there ever be another Don DeLillo novel? When will the next William Gibson book be published?
▰ I finished reading two novels this week: Jon Fosse’s Morning and Evening and Sarah Gailey’s Spread Me, respectively the 25th and 26th of the year (not counting a novel’s worth of books I started and didn’t finish). The strongest aspect of Morning and Evening, to me, is the fluidity with which Fosse paints these liminal existential/theological spaces. It was interesting to have completed it right after What We Can Know, by Ian McEwan (Atonement), because both novels have distinct parts one and two. In What We Can Know, there is a lot of part one before the jump; in Morning and Evening, there is precious little. Meanwhile, the “literary” What We Can Do and the “pulpy” Spread Me both take the future impact of climate change as their starting points, and both are lust-heavy. I’m almost done with Jinwoo Park’s Oxford Soju Club, and deep into several others, Middlemarch, House of Leaves, and Midnight’s Children among them. Yeah, too many at once, again. That’s one new year’s resolution deflated before the new year has even begun.
Stigmatic Ambient Music, Update 2
In which a negative is no longer misrepresented
Back in April I wrote a post about a fake genre, which I had named “stigmatic ambient music.” For months afterward, a search for the name on Google would return statements as if the genre were real, which it wasn’t and still isn’t. This phenomenon was a classic AI feedback loop, in which a negative was misinterpreted as a positive. My original post was not an attempt at culture jamming. I hadn’t acted as if the genre was real. Quite the contrary, the post’s subhead stated clearly that stigmatic ambient music “doesn’t exist.”
Two months after that first post, I wrote an update that noted this ongoing issue with “stigmatic ambient music.” Google persisted in stating as fact that the genre not only existed but flourished sufficiently to deserve a detailed description of its characteristics:
“Stigmatic ambient music is a subgenre of ambient music that blends elements of dark ambient and industrial music to create a soundscape focused on pain, suffering, and psychological distress. It’s characterized by its use of dissonance, harsh textures, and a focus on unease or dread, often achieved through sound design rather than melody.”
I bookmarked the Google search results for the non-genre, bounded by the preceding 24 hours, and I made a habit of clicking on the link each morning, and this remained the case day after day, month after month. Nothing of note changed.
And then today, December 19, for the first time, the search results reflected what had actually happened. This is the text of this morning’s automated summary attributed to Google Gemini:
The word “hallucination” gives me pause, because even if accepted as merely colloquial, it serves as an anthropomorphism that reinforces the problem (that is, the flattering presumption of cognition and awareness), but otherwise the description is, for once, factually accurate.
I suspect the change may relate in some way to Google having recently indexed a June 8, 2026, post by software engineer Jim Kang that briefly mentioned my exploration of AI’s response to the non-genre.
This development is good, because the correction has occurred, but less good, in that all it may have required was one sentence from a third party in order to entirely change Google’s AI mind (or “mind”) on the topic.
Scratch Pad: Lore, 1988, Obsidian
From the past week
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. 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:
▰ Back early on when I was teaching a course on sound at a local art college, maybe 2013 or 2014, a student asked me, during discussion toward the end of a semester, what I though the normalized state of everyday being would become, given how fast things seemed, at the time, to be changing — and this is a decade-plus ago — and my response, in the moment, was “flux.”
I though “flux” might become an everyday sensibility. We might be concerned about flux but we would also adjust to and even take pleasure in flux. Flux was sort of the opposite of the supposed “end of history,” or an aslant corollary. Flux was change as a manic constant.
What I didn’t foresee was “lore,” which has clearly prevailed. Lore is the glue — whether fictional, or as a matter of heightened narrative-providing, dot-connecting facets of everyday life — that keeps things together. Lore’s prevalence in particular in the consumption (and collective contribution to) popular fiction feels like an expression of a desire for such continuity outside of fiction: lore as an antidote to flux. Lore is the anti-flux.
I still take pleasure in flux. To me, flux is riding the everyday, a bit like standing while on a public bus, or dodging fellow pedestrians while keeping up a good pace on a city sidewalk. I’ve never had great balance physically, but I can handle the cultural and technological flux okay. Keeping track of lore is not as much of a strength for me, come to think of it.
▰ I’m always keeping an eye on the Obsidian roadmap, Obsidian being my note-taking and writing cross-platform app of choice. Excited for a lot of what’s ahead, especially multiplayer, mobile widgets, and Bases support for Publish.
▰ It’s kind of funny to attend a concert in a church with a massive pipe organ, and the pipe organ just serves as a visual backdrop. No one plays it.
▰ I had an iPod but the vibration of the pre-SSD ones weirded me out. I think I used mostly rando Sandisk-type ones until the Touch came out.
▰ I have, based on recent evidence, found myself deeply in a phase of my life where I find concerts of songs that are all verse chorus verse, and during which there’s no musical improvisation, to be fully claustrophobia-inducing.
▰ When I got out of college, in 1988, I lived, for a spell, walking distance from the old Knitting Factory, the one on Houston Street. This year, 2025, here in San Francisco, I managed to walk from my home to concerts featuring Marc Ribot (in Golden Gate Park) and Fred Frith (at the 4 Star), both of whom I saw at the Knitting Factory way back when. More of this in 2026, please.
▰ I didn’t finish reading anything this week, but considering what I finished reading last week, I think that’s OK. I’m very close on Jon Fosse’s Morning and Evening and Sarah Gailey’s Spread Me.
A URL of My Own
Disquiet.com at 29: things become things
December 13, 2025, marks the 29th anniversary of the day I bought the URL disquiet.com. On December 13, 1996, I submitted the paperwork to make the purchase. This involved a fax machine and a photocopy machine and a phone call. I’d had server space, accessible by http:// on nascent Internet (it was capitalized back then) browsers, for several years, but up until that point I’d never had — to borrow the formulation from Virginia Woolf and, in between, Michael Pollan — a URL of my own. I feel like it was all http:// back then, and I’m not certain when the move to https:// fully set in. The added “S” stands, I believe, for “security,” which may say something about the postdiluvian internet we now inhabit.
The word “blog” reportedly didn’t arrive until 1999, but a blog Disquiet.com was. Along the way, a friend of mine, the illustrator and designer Jorge Colombo, proposed I add datelines next to posts. Jorge commented that adding dates to posts would aid returning regular readers in situating themselves in the flow of information. Little did either of us know how much of the rest of our lives would involve situating ourselves in the flow of information.
Today, in 2025, a dateline may seem inherent in the concept of blogging, but before there were blogs there things becoming blogs, much as before “social media” there was “microblogging.” Things become things. That was the case in more ways than one with Disquiet.com. At first the website was just remnants of my server-stage web content, and then it was articles I first published elsewhere, notably in the music magazines of Tower Records (Pulse!, Classical Pulse!, and epulse), which I had, toward the close of 1996, just stopped working at as an editor in order to start a gig at a company of the sort that was then called a dot-com and is now called a startup. (Lest anyone jump to conclusions, I did not get rich, nor was that the expectation. It was a job.)
Much like with the adding of publication dates to individual posts, I stumbled upon the idea of posting directly to Disquiet.com. People would say things like, “Hey, great interview, when’s the next one?” And I’d say, “Well, first I need to get assigned a freelance article, and then it needs to get published” — this was 1996 and 1997, so I meant in print — “and then enough time needs to go by that I feel comfortable posting it online.” And eventually one of the people who asked this question of me must have said something like, “Hey, why don’t you just write, ya know, for Disquiet.com?” And so I did.
This was all being coded by hand, by the way. Disquiet.com continued to be all hand-coded HTML, including the eventual RSS feed, from 1996 until 2007, when I paid someone to port it all to WordPress. I think about this phase of my life a lot, and on the 13th of each December each year, if I have the time — as I have a bit of today, after a walk to the ocean and back — I jot down the memories. I’m interested to look back and see how details shift and are clarified and gain (and provide) context as the years go by.
I should mention that my pre-vanity-URL Internet server space had simply come along with the ISP (Internet Service Provider) subscription that enabled a dial-up connection in my apartment. The fact that the ISP subscription included server space says something about the sort of people who were using dial-up service at that time. Today, internet access doesn’t come with, let alone encourage, the use of personally identifiable space online; that change may say something as well, something about how the internet has transformed from a loose many-to-many system to an archipelago of commercial platforms. I avoided the word “blog” for a long time, enjoying being able to note, as a kind of honorary digital native, that my website preceded the word, so I was grandfathered in as something else, something less easily characterized. As time passed, however, a funny thing happened. I stopped disliking the word blog and started encouraging its use. More than ever, I think blogging is important. I think more people should have URLs of their own.
Next year will mark Disquiet.com’s 30th anniversary. Looks like we’ll have at least one live event in the San Francisco Bay Area to note it. Maybe some other activities, too. I never know with anniversaries if the lead up to or the time after is the “celebration zone,” so I guess I have roughly two years to have fun with.