I’ve taken two rides in driverless cars so far, both times alone, both times to dental appointments to which I was in a rush, and after which I wasn’t sure I’d be in a condition to drive, though both times I felt fine afterward and took the public bus home — once on a rapid bus, which is rapid indeed.
There are several competing models of self-driving cars that circle San Francisco like mundane sentries. One thing they have in common is their whir, which is similar to that of other electric vehicles. However, combined with the steadiness of their pace and their strict adherence to stop signs and stop lights, that whir has a far less revved-up vibe. It’s really more drone than whir. These driverless cars are drones that drone.
Once you’re inside such a vehicle, the touchscreen interface — as well as your phone — provides various options for music and sound environments, but during both my rides I almost immediately turned off the piped-in sound entirely, and just settled into that placid hum, experiencing the drone from the inside.
I still don’t know what to think about the impact — economic and otherwise — of driverless vehicles. I’m just reflecting, at the moment, on routine experience as a pedestrian and occasional driver, and now a two-time rider.
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).
I have a few pieces in the works for the awesome hilobrow.com website. The latest to see publication is for Skank Your Enthusiasm, a collection of 25 people writing about our favorite ska records. Contributors include Lucy Sante, Douglas Wolk, Carl Wilson, Annie Zaleski, Heather Quinlan, and the series’ editor, Josh Glenn — and me. I wrote about “Rudy, a Message to You” originally by Dandy Livingstone (aka Robert Livingstone Thompson). The first section appears below. The full piece is at hilobrow.com.
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 break, through the start of January 2026. Which raises the question: If I’m on a social media (and adjacent) 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 just got to the point in Mick Herron’s latest Slow Horses novel, Clown Town, where Roddy Ho appears to be singing the theme song to the TV show (“losers and boozers”), and Lech, overhearing him, says, “Working on your theme song?” Fan service at its finest. I also understand from an interview I saw with the actor who plays Ho, Christopher Chung, that he is quite the vocalist. Nice touch setting him up to sing when this eventually becomes an episode.
▰ I’ve realized I’ve gotten into this habit of listening to the second track of an album first, because so many albums have the first track as a sort of intro thing, and I want to drop right into the thick of it. I eventually do hear the first track, because I tend to listen on loop, so eventually it comes back around to the first track — but often, oddly, it’s the last track I’ll hear.
▰ My lizard brain recognized that parts of the melodies of Simon & Garfunkel’s “The 59th Street Bridge Song (Feelin’ Groovy)” (1966) and the theme song to the TV show H.R. Pufnstuf (1969) are quite similar, and my current earworm is a mashup thereof.
▰ I’ve watched several review videos of these screen protectors for iPads that give it a paper-like quality. And the reviewers frequently mention how the material “sounds like paper,” as per this screenshot.
▰ There is a newsletter (Substack) from Liz Harris (aka Grouper). (Thanks, Pablo Flouret!)
▰ Something I typed yielded both “breaking“ and “healing” as options. That is verging on literary quantum superposition. Schrödinger’s dictionary.
▰ Tired: Last Night a DJ Saved My Life
Wired: This Morning Backblaze Saved My MP3 Hard Drive
▰ And speaking of social media, there is an odd void in streaming music. One of the best parts of the long defunct rdio, which lasted from my birthday in 2020 until the end of 2015, was how you could track what friends were listening to. Soundcloud, likewise, early on had a “groups” function, which the service dispensed with. There’s a new service, called record.club, which describes itself as “a social music network.” The founders seem pretty self-aware, per the FAQ: “The obvious comparison is Goodreads and Letterboxd (or for that matter, Rate Your Music).” (There’s also a This Is My Jam vibe, etc., etc.) And: “Sure, that sounds a bit vague—but that’s the point.” I’m on at record.club/disquiet. I may post some additional thoughts as I explore it. I’m somewhat list-averse, so this may not be for me, but we’ll see.
▰ According to the November 20 New York Times Mini Crossword, “skip” is a colloquial noun for a “Song on an album that you always avoid.” I didn’t know this was in common usage.
