Tag: current activities

I do this manually each Saturday, usually in the morning over coffee: collating most of the little comments I’ve made on social media (as well as related notes), which I think of as my public scratch pad, during the preceding week. These days that mostly means @[email protected] (on Mastodon). Sometimes the material pops up earlier or in expanded form.

▰ The siren of the emergency vehicle passing by sounds like a goose with its feathers on fire

▰ The 2024 Oscar race has already begun outside my window, where insane wind is loudly pursuing a Best Sound award

▰ The zombie episode of The Makanai: Cooking for the Maiko House is so great — watching characters come alive by being undead. Such a wonderful series.

▰ One thing I love about the process of returning a library book (besides, you know, the free* part) is imagining who will get it next. I just returned Benjamín Labatut’s When We Cease to Understand the World, which I held onto after I finished reading it because I kept sneaking peeks back at passages I’d noted. I kinda wish there were a way, with local libraries, to opt into a “book chain,” where you can meet people who read the same book around the same time.

*yeah yeah taxes — shaddup

▰ Me this morning: I probably don’t need this second large screen in the office.

Me this evening: I could use a third large screen.

No matter how many photos I take in the same spot, the first one is almost always my favorite, and the last one is never my favorite. There may be a lesson in that, huh?

I do this manually each Saturday, usually in the morning over coffee: collating most of the little comments I’ve made on social media (as well as related notes), which I think of as my public scratch pad, during the preceding week. These days that mostly means post.lurk.org (on Mastodon). Sometimes the material pops up earlier or in expanded form.

▰ My childhood: the delay between lightning and then the thunder

My adulthood: the delay between lighting and then the app on my phone that tells me there was lighting nearby and then the thunder

▰ The rain is so intense it sounds like I’m inside a dishwasher

▰ I love that there’s an app called Lightning Pro because it suggests a presumption of amateur lightning

▰ Honk if you’re listening to the new Necks album, Travel

▰ Long day. TV doing it thing from another room. Dryer droning intently in what must be Ridley Scott cycle. In the back, so no cars passing. The rain is on pause, so none of nature’s white noise. Bliss.

▰ Yo, book peeps. Anyone out there read both Convenience Store Woman (2016) by Sayaka Murata and Chemistry (2017) by Weiki Wang? I read (and loved) the Murata, and I started the Wang this week. A lot of interesting parallels.

▰ Alvin Lucier, but from his next door neighbor’s perspective

▰ I’m trying out the terminal tool Tut as a means to post to Mastodon. This is Tut:

https://github.com/RasmusLindroth/tut.

Like a lot of terminal options, it feels more like a party trick than a useful tool, but it’s pretty nifty.

▰ How weird that the Great Expectations trailer doesn’t mention Charles Dickens

▰ I’m pretty sure someone in the neighborhood has a marimba and I’m very happy about it

▰ Whew, Wayne Shorter and David Lindley in one week. The Grim Reaper is working overtime and has impeccable taste.

Coming off the dark intensity of Fernanda Melchor’s Hurricane Season, I’m treating myself to the simple pleasures of a very John le Carré-esque spy story, the novel Box 88 by Charles Cumming. It’s the most Carré thing I’ve read by a contemporary writer. It’s not an arch character study like Mick Herron. It’s not as baroquely plotted a puzzle as Olen Steinhauer. It does, however, emphasize elements we expected from Carré: elite private schools, class warfare as cold war, a distant parent (here a demanding, widowed mother in place of Carré’s usual flamboyant, dissolute father), and personal moments that a lesser writer couldn’t pull off — and that readers of those writers likely wouldn’t tolerate. And like any solid teller of spy stories must be, Cumming is an excellent listener. There is an extended sequence about a third of the way through Box 88 when two MI5 agents are tailing a suspect primarily by listening to what’s happening with the suspect thanks to hidden microphones. We don’t just hear what they hear. Cumming helps us hear as they hear — the straining, the confusion, the headache-inducing consideration of possible inferences.