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 serves, I’ve found, 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 it 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:
▰ There’s something orderly about a month that begins on a Monday, almost as if all months should.
▰ In just over a year, come 2027, it’ll be the 300th anniversary of Benjamin Franklin’s original Junto, and the occasion will be noted and celebrated.
▰ Barbershop scene report: seven men in a small storefront room with the Kinks’ “Come On Now” playing. And yes it’s been a while since I got my hair cut.
▰ The song I listened to most this year on YouTube Music, per the “recap,” was a song I’d written an article about, naturally: Dandy Livingstone’s “Rudy, a Message to You,” for 72 minutes total. Rounding out the top five: some Hildegard von Bingen, by the Sixteen, the opening tracks on their album Angel of Peace; the seventh track on Nils Frahm’s Music for Animals, “Right Right Right”; the third track on Barker’s Stochastic Drift, “Difference and Repetition”; and the Specials’ cover of that Dandy Livingstone song. Also according to the YouTube end-of-year wrap-up, I am in the top 3% of listeners to the music of Trent Reznor.
▰ I keep an eye on Metallica’s ever-expanding public archive of live shows. I enjoyed this detail from the most recent one:
And for bonus “charm,” the tape flip (IYKYK) lands right in the middle of “Fade to Black.”
Oddly the annotation doesn’t appear on the tape’s webpage, just in the solicitation email.
▰ I was just looking at the Wikipedia page for the Oblique Strategies card deck, the famed collaboration between Brian Eno and Peter Schmidt, and I noticed that the main photo (upper right corner of the page) of the deck is by none other than Cory Doctorow, who uploaded it to his Flickr account with a Creative Commons license in 2013 — Flickr (launched 2004), Creative Commons (2001), and Wikipedia (also 2001) being part of the older web, if not the old web.
▰ I was using Safari as my main browser, but it lagged and hung too often, so I moved to Zen, which was excellent but also eventually did the same. This is on an M1 MacBook Pro 14”. So at some friends’ recommendation, I moved to Vivaldi, which is sort of a sequel to the browser Opera. I found Opera, back in the day, a bit baroque, so to speak, but Vivaldi is streamlined and full of little touches I appreciate — including the ability, with the click of a button, to enter “break mode,” which mutes and blanks out every single tab, a welcome respite-by-command.
▰ I definitely fell back into the habit of reading too many books at the same time this year. Doing so didn’t impact my comprehension or the number of books I read, but it did, I think, decrease some of the enjoyment. I’m going to try to reverse course this coming year. In any case, it was due to such parallel processing that in one single week, this past one, I finished reading not only Herman Melville’s Moby Dick, but also Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian (which is set at roughly the same time as Moby Dick, but takes place on land), and Laurie Colwin’s Goodbye Without Leaving, as well as most of Ian McEwan’s What We Can Know, which I imagine I’ll finish in the coming week, work allowing.
