Scratch Pad: Fireworks, Bootlegs, Spock

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. These days that mostly means Mastodon (at post.lurk.org/@disquiet), and I’m also trying out a few others, including Bluesky (disquiet.bsky.social), which remains behind a beta firewall at the moment, and, yes, Threads (threads.net/@dsqt). Today’s Scratch Pad entry went out at the end of the day, because I drove to Stockton and back to attend a comic book convention.

▰ When I was in high school I worked for the school newspaper. One day, a kid said he was gonna start an “underground” school paper. I went to that meeting. It was the same people. This is what every new social media app feels like.

▰ The life cycle of (solo effort) to-do list tools: single text/markdown doc → spreadsheet → wide range of apps → single text doc

▰ If only the annual San Francisco fog cover could muffle the sound of fireworks as effectively as it dims the rumored visuals

▰ Listening to a bootleg of a concert you attended in 1989 and wondering if that was your own voice you just heard amid the cheering

▰ Several people have uploaded their Disquiet Junto tracks this week to Bandcamp, and I thought, “Hey, since I can make a playlist on the mobile Bandcamp app, I’ll do so.” Then I realized I can’t share that playlist with anyone else

▰ Pretty sure that’s the most musicians we’ve ever had in a single Disquiet Junto project: 73. We had 67 on SoundCloud and 6 on Bandcamp.

▰ Strange New Worlds is already my favorite recent Star Trek. Spock getting a noise complaint for playing his Vulcan lute was icing on the cake.

▰ I memed, inspired by the recent episodes of Strange New Worlds:

▰ I remain convinced that most categories of online services are akin either to hair salons, to grocery stores, or to movie theaters. That is, either you choose one service and stick with it, or you have a main one but go to others, or you don’t really care but have some preferences. I think social media has mostly been a hair salon until recently. I don’t think it can persist in movie theater mode, which lately is how things feel. We’ll see what happens next.

▰ Interesting that this whole thing Meta built is built around the assumption you’ll wanna create threads — rather than standalone posts. Or perhaps “threads” is also meant to include conversations. I generally see threads on TUS* as a bonus not the point. But maybe that’s because I work in paragraphs for a living, and single-thought posts feel like a holiday.

*the unmentionable service

▰ The stairway at the Luggage Store Gallery is one of my favorite passageways in the entirety of San Francisco

▰ When you attend a drone noise improv performance, and your phone starts cosplaying like it’s the rogue AI from Person of Interest

▰ It’s weird. The concept of threads on Twitter originated as a user innovation, drawing from pre-Twitter online discussion platforms, and then Twitter built the ability to construct threads into its UX. As of this past week, Thread is now the name of a competing service. On this competing service, even a single post is called a “thread” though by the original definition — the definition at least until the day this competing service went live — a single post isn’t a thread.