Scratch Pad: RSS, Pedals, Barbershop

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’m not, by any means, planning on getting a vanity plate — but if I were to …

▰ Yeah, I played hooky this week and went to the de Young Museum for the manga exhibit, which is pretty darn great

▰ I’ve only really used modulargrid.net for Eurorack, so when I looked in the (guitar) pedals section, I was surprised to find things like an Akai MPC1000 and an Elektron Digitakt listed

▰ Was holding out for number 1 but so be it

▰ Barbershop update: The barber who usually has oldies playing was out for the day, the other barber was enjoying the silence, and who am I to argue?

▰ Read a ton, finished nothing.

Always Be Doing

And the benefits of a deadline

This paragraph is from the email newsletter that will announce tomorrow’s Disquiet Junto project. It provides context for the week’s effort. This will be the 720th consecutive Disquiet Junto project.

This week’s project involves reworking recent work. It was inspired by a few different observations, one of which comes in the form of a memory from college. I worked for a spell on one of the literary magazines published by students. Early my first year, the editor-in-chief had quickly announced a due date for submissions. My immediate sense was this impending date didn’t provide sufficient time for potential contributors to write something. I came to understand that the sort of writers this publication was looking for didn’t need to be told to do something in order to start it. They would already be writing regularly. They just needed to be given a deadline to finish one of the things they were working on. I think about this experience all the time.

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: