Scratch Pad: Lights, Construction, Files

I do this manually each Saturday, usually in the morning over coffee: collating most of the little comments I’ve made on social media, which I think of as my public scratch pad, during the preceding week (or in this case, the past two weeks). These days that mostly means post.lurk.org (Mastodon).

▰ The hazard lights in this electric car I’ve been driving aren’t mechanical. They make the familiar clicking sound for the first minute or so and then they turn off. The lights keep blinking but they no longer click. It has a vague “We’re done with the charade” vibe. What’s interesting is how it seems that in the transition from fossil fuel to electric, even things unrelated to gasoline end up electrified, rather than being left mechanical. Or something along those lines.

▰ For all the improvements of laptop computers over the years, the one I’m perhaps most thankful for is that the thing is immediately functional when I open it

▰ Sources of late-morning sounds: passing bus, washing machine, creaking of floorboards, neighbor’s garage door, gentle whir of air filter (allergy season), muffled voices as people walk by outside

▰ Sound of the day goes to the tiny, tinny radio on which a construction crew was listening to a sports event, the play-by-play announcement of which was reduced to some exceptionally narrow band of what might be described as the high treble spectrum. From halfway down the block, it was like listening to mice stage whisper, and it grew no more comprehensible as I approached. I’m not convinced the crew even understood much of it, either. It was more like a comforting story being told in an adult nursery.

▰ The best part of Succession ending will be never having to hear that melody again in yet another instrumental arrangement

▰ That thing where you take a handful of awkwardly named wav files that constitute an album and put them in iTunes (excuse me, Apple Music) and fix the song titles and add the year and the track numbers and the art, and then hit save, and it doesn’t break the set into three different mini-albums. And you take a slow breath as you back away and promise yourself never to touch those files again. Whew.

▰ It’s 2023. I don’t need to take my keychain out of my pocket to start the car. I do need to in order to access certain accounts from my computer.