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 saying the fog isn’t thick today. Thick it is: no bridge, no Headlands. But when it’s this thick and there’s no fog horns, I wonder if I’m overestimating its thickness, like it’s so thick that it’s muffled the sound. A tugboat drones along China Beach, simply to confirm my ears haven’t gone.
▰ I’m reading Moby Dick, which is way funnier than I expected: “cherish the greatest respect towards everybody’s religious obligations, never mind how comical” (actual quote). I’m 18 (short) chapters in, and there is much comedy gold. I love how Ahab’s cartoonish henchmen are like “No cannibals!” Then the cannibal, Queequeg, throws a touchdown. And they’re all: “We want the cannibal!” (Those last two are paraphrases.) Also, how they call Queequeg “Hedgehog.” OMG.
▰ MP3s, FLACs, and WAVs: “Music metadata is a mess”
ebooks: “Hold my beer”
▰ I’m prone to earaches when it’s windy, and I’ve been amazed by how earbuds essentially solved this problem: I set the earbuds to ambient* mode and then go for a walk.
*that is, enhancing the environmental sounds, not listening to ambient music at a high volume
▰ I often read a novel over breakfast, but there are better ways to start the day than a protagonist’s dog and (human) oldest friend both dying within a few paragraphs of each other.
▰ I’ve switched browsers on a test basis (Zen, a streamlined take on Firefox). With a heavily used tool like a browser, such a switch means a lot of muscle-memory revisions and habit shifts. Emerging from a week of UX decompression, I find myself still not recognizing the new browser’s logo as my browser when I tab through the open software on my laptop. Otherwise, I feel at home.
▰ I finished reading one novel this week, Beautyland by Marie-Helene Bertino. I enjoyed it, even though I ventured in due to the suggestion of science fiction, which then becomes an either-or decision on the part of the individual reader, and I found myself erring on the side of it not being science fiction, which meant the book’s end proved quite dark, which is an interesting effect, amounting to an encouragement, after the fact, for the non-believing reader to retroactively believe the protagonist, in order for the end to be recast as a positive one.
