Scratch Pad: Commas, Koyaanisqatsi, AFX

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. 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.

▰ I need to hack my TV to include serial commas in captions

▰ Sitting here in the mall by myself with my earbuds in noise cancellation mode, listening to abstract music, I can tell you that just about any track of abstract music would work as a music video if you just set up a camera in a mall and let the world saunter by. It’s like a minimalist-budget Koyaanisqatsi.

▰ My video playlist on YouTube of live performances of ambient music is up to 225 tracks. It is, apparently, 31 hours, 48 minutes, and 1 second in length. (Tracks come and go. I rarely if ever delete them from the playlist, but sometimes they do get removed from the overall service.)

▰ That’s pretty cool. I didn’t realize that the Spanish edition of my 33 1/3 book on Aphex Twin’s Selected Ambient Works Volume II was the first book in the series of Spanish translations. Some background on the publisher here (in Spanish).

▰ Have a good weekend. Open a window as soon as you wake up. Search an ebook of your favorite novel from childhood for the words “sound” and “listen” and note the results. Play an album very loud from the next room over. See you Tuesday — or maybe Wednesday.

▰ Read a ton this week; finished nothing.

After Autechre

October 9, 2025

Got a good photo of Autechre’s awesome show at the Regency here in San Francisco:

Bonus points to the musician — FiLTHMiLK, I was informed by Wobbly — who set up across the street from the Autechre concert at the Regency and drew a crowd when the show ended, around 11:15pm.

Oh, and in case the joke up top didn’t register, here is what was projected on the screen in advance of Autechre taking the stage:

Scratch Pad: Concerts, Spiders, Glaspy

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. 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.

▰ Afternoon trio for two air filters and a ceiling fan

▰ I’m seeing Marc Ribot on Friday, Nick Lowe on Sunday, and Autechre the following Thursday — it’s the mid-1990s all over again.

▰ The start of October in San Francisco is when you traditionally sweep away the actual spiderwebs in order to then put up fake spiderwebs

▰ An under-appreciated feature of Apple’s Find My Phone service is that after using it to play a sound on your lost phone you are left with an earworm of Depeche Mode’s “Just Can’t Get Enough”

▰ I briefly thought the shutdown might mean a quiet Fleet Week, but no, there still will be jet fighters (Canadian ones) LARPing WWIII (see: sfgate.com).

▰ Most of the time in an interview, if the interviewee says, “That’s an interesting question,” what they mean is “I don’t have a prepared answer for that, and so I’m gonna buy myself a few valuable seconds of thinking time by instinctively complimenting you.”

▰ I don’t need to put Bandcamp Friday on my calendar. I can tell it’s Bandcamp Friday first thing when I look at my inbox that morning and there’s a 100 more emails than usual.

▰ Current status, Hardly Strictly Bluegrass 2025:

▰ Read a bunch, finished nothing. In the middle of many books.