Category: field notes

News, essays, reviews, surveillance

Scratch Pad: Tron, NIN, Pacific

From the past week

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

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.

▰ Interesting that Tron: Ares, the upcoming movie, has a score credited to Nine Inch Nails, not to Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross. Is this just a name-recognition / branding / attitude thing, or is there more to it?

A friend on Mastodon helpfully directed me to an interview with Reznor, who explained: “It is as Nine Inch Nails, and I think it’s influenced the way we approach scoring. It’s going to be a little grittier, and it’s just different; it’s still the same two people, but we’re in a different mindset. We feel like we can play by different rules a bit, and the people working on the film were excited about that, so we thought we’d try it.”

▰ That thing where a couple days after you get off a plane you use your pen and realize a little too late that at some point it began to leak under pressure.

▰ Random low-level Gmail weirdness: why it is, when I search for “label:inbox label:unread” and tag some email (say, one of 100 new music PR messages) to a “label,” sometimes it goes there immediately, whereas most of the time I have to hit “apply”?

▰ 7 weeks from the 700th consecutive weekly Disquiet Junto project

▰ My hallucinogen of choice is realizing that I’ve been walking around with my reading glasses on

▰ End of day, end of week.

Whew, and what a week.

▰ I’m enjoying Adrian Tchaikovsky’s Children of Time more than I did his Shards of Earth, but as I may have learned the hard way, it’s also not a book to read if you have even low-level arachnophobia (which is to say, if you’re an even remotely rational human being).

▰ Over vacation I managed to read two novels and a graphic novel (Smith, Didion, Tommaso), and while I read a bunch this week (Tchaikovsky), I didn’t finish any novels, just one graphic novel, Kit Alexander’s Second Shift.

On Not Sounding Like Oneself

In which I may misquote Douglas Coupland

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

I sent this message as part of the email instructions to members of the Disquiet Junto, via the juntoletter.disquiet.com, on April 10, 2025:

We’re seven weeks from the 700th consecutive weekly Disquiet Junto project, which makes for a pretty great feeling. This week’s project — the 693rd — is extra abstract, and occasionally they go that way. It’s good to mix it up. I wanted to mention two related things to participants who sometimes may sense that a given project doesn’t “sound” like them — people say this to me privately, and also express it on the discussion boards, so this encouragement isn’t aimed at anyone in particular. First, if you are concerned some of your Junto projects are distinct from your work, you might set up a separate account when posting the results. Second, I like to paraphrase a writing exercise I believe I read in something Douglas Coupland (Generation X, Microserfs) published a long time ago, which is to try to write a character in a story as unlike you as possible and put it in an envelope for six months. Then open the envelope, and see how much of yourself you actually do see in that character.

Separately, we’ll be doing the trio project we do each year pretty soon. I may start it just before the 700th project, so the trios are complete coincident with that milestone, but I may take a different route. We’ll see.