Disquiet

I do this manually each week, collating the tweets I made at twitter.com/disquiet that I want to keep track of. For the most part, this means ones I initiated, not ones in which I directly responded to someone. I sometimes tweak them a bit here. It’s usually personally informative to revisit the previous week of thinking out loud, and yow what a week this has been.

▰ “Sound is a mechanical wave. Its energy travels through a medium. … His scream must have travelled at the resonant frequency of dilithium’s subspace components.” (The Star Trek: Discovery finale wasn’t entirely my thing, but it still had my number.)

▰ Whatever happens today, at least my laptop no longer beeps every time I plug in my phone or iPad. (Or, that’s the highlight of the week, and it’s all downhill from here.)

▰ I’ve learned many things about myself during pandemic shut-in life, and key among them is that I’m way more into Miss Marple than into James Bond.

▰ “The sonic scale of interstellar turbulence.” I truly have no idea what this means (nature.com), but it is my favorite clause of the week so far. I believe this explains is a bit more. I could also be entirely wrong: nature.com.

▰ The good news: there will be a new season of Schoolhouse Rock.

The bad news: due to current events, it will be rated R.

▰ I sure miss in-person guitar class, but it’s sure nice to be able to, the second Zoom class is over, use my phone to record myself playing certain sequences before I forget them entirely.

▰ “Sorry, I need to listen to this document right now.” (Thing I just heard myself say.)

▰ Seems sorta personal. I might prefer a one-on-one session.

▰ RIP, Salvador Lopez Monroy, founder of the Mission District’s El Farolito. The morning after we moved back to San Francisco after 4 years in New Orleans, we knew exactly where to go. We drove straight to El Farolito and ordered more food than we could finish.

▰ Reminder of the bliss of setting your Twitter location to a country where you don’t know the language (bonus points if you appreciate the characters’ aesthetics). The social media equivalent of working in a coffee shop where everyone’s chattering but you don’t understand a word.

▰ Current guitar class homework

▰ Send communications between Annares and Urras with ease

▰ Today’s home office tip: an old Lego box makes a good caddy for cables, notebooks, and other doodads.

I recently re-watched a favorite movie, Colossus: The Forbin Project, for the HiLobrow series of essays on pre-Star Wars science fiction. Which got me thinking about set design in Jacque Tati’s Playtime, diversity on Star Trek, and how Jonathan Nolan’s pre-Westworld series Person of Interest was a form of fan fiction. The short version is that architecture is destiny. The essay itself is at hilobrow.com.

Contributors to the series, which is titled Klaatu You, include Erik Davis, Madeline Ashby, Peggy Nelson, Luc Sante, Rob Walker, Seth (an essay, not a comic), Susannah Breslin, Gary Panter (also an essay, not a comic), James Hannaham, and Neil LaBute, among many others. Start with editor Josh Glenn’s introduction.

This is from The Twisted Ones, a 2019 novel by T. Kingfisher, pseudonym of the author Ursula Vernon. I don’t read a lot of horror, and the recommendation from a friend was an attempt, successful so far, to extend my literary horizons. The connection between horror fiction and horror movies seems more distant than, by way of contrast, in science fiction, historical romance, or spy thrillers. The tensions in this novel are less less intense, more slow-burn, less acute, more atmospheric, than would be the case in a filmed telling of the same story. A moment that read and viewed versions might have in common is when atmosphere is the topic, though then the film would have to sort out how to posit the sort of simile that the narrator (along with the author) is free accomplish with a toss-away phrase.