Category: field notes

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.

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 find knowing I’ll revisit my posts to be a positive and mellowing influence on my social media 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 made to myself that I would have posted online. Just because I’ve stopped posting doesn’t mean my brain has stopped making posts. I’m nearly done with a full week off work, but my time off social media — my time with fewer threads of conversations to track — has a full month to go.

▰ At a concert recently, the music was deep and sinuous, and the interplay of the musicians was exactly what one might hope for. I closed my eyes and I didn’t drift off, not in the slightest; if anything, I was more present. And something occurred to me in my presentness, which was: You know, at some point we all have to go, and there would be worse ways to go. (I mean I hope way down the road, of course.)

▰ I’ve found that the Safari browser and the Zen browser have been working very slowly on my M1 MacBook Pro (I know the M5s are coming out, but I’m trying to hold out until the M6), so I’m testing the Vivaldi browser, which has been working well on my laptop and my iPhone, but when I pull up the settings on my iPad (M5 iPad Pro, running current iPadOS) to sync, I get … a blank screen. There is never a day when nothing doesn’t work.

▰ I’m playing the video game Split Fiction currently (on PS5), and it’s split between fantasy mode and science fiction mode. A pair of characters represent the two storytelling types, and they have to learn to work together (as in It Takes Two — from the same company, Hazelight Studios — which I’ve also played). It’s a lot of fun, and tropes have reinforced for me that I’m very much a science fiction mode person, though I do have plans to try to re-read The Lord of the Rings this coming year.

▰ There is a certain type of movie that brings out people who go to the movies so infrequently that they can’t navigate movie theaters, and I can confirm from recent personal experience that Hamnet is just such a movie. And it differs from the novel on which it is based — and which I did enjoy quite a bit — in various ways, including the absence of the great flea/plague chapter, on screen tidily summarized with shadow puppets. It may fit into the category of films in which “screaming is acting.” There is a powerful depiction of how Hamlet expresses Shakespeare’s grief at the loss of a child, and how by having to be a ghost visiting the still alive Hamlet, Shakespeare-the-actor can address his own personal trauma and make it something that his audience can, in turn, experience — which, to bring things full circle, keeps his son present, if not alive; not a ghost, but a memory. There’s a moment at the end, when the play is staged, that is clearly intended to evoke something that happens early in the movie, and I kept thinking, “Please don’t show us a flashback. We remember. It’s only been two hours.” And I’m relieved to say, there was no flashback to this particular thing. There are other flashbacks, but at least not that one. And Max Richter’s score is quite beautiful, even if they do reuse an old piece of his music.

▰ You can tell it’s a long holiday weekend because there are far fewer than usual software updates.

▰ Perhaps the iPad has been this way for a while, but I noticed that now the up/down volume functions differently in profile and landscape modes. In portfolio mode, the “top” button (aka “left” in landscape) raises the volume, and likewise in landscape mode the “right” button (aka “bottom” in profile) lowers the volume. This is as it should be.

▰ Word I learned from Moby Dick this week: “hist.” And now I’m wondering if the shushers in the final scene in (the film version of) Hamnet are saying “hist.” And whether this bled into the “ssst” that people now say when shushing people.

▰ Finished reading one book this week, Mick Herron’s Clown Town. It’s quite good. Almost done with several others, among them Blood Meridian, Moby Dick, and Laurie Colwin’s excellent Goodbye Without Leaving (which was recommended to me by N+1’s annual bookmatch).